Tuesday 4 August 2020

My students so far today

Today one of my students said, just like many other times before "this doesn't have sense" - How can I get them to memorise the equivalent phrase in English?  "make sense" - this doesn't make sense. Repeat, repeat repeat but what if they just don't bother?

Another student online: when asked how are you?  he says "I am blessed and you"  no punctuation marks, by the way. Apparently he's heard it many times. videos about how to answer the question in what I called "international English" instead of this  "culturally charged" reply, influenced by their country socialising questions, where religion plays a bigger role than in our more secular Europe.
An near-B1 who wants to be C1 in about 6 weeks.


Monday 3 August 2020

how to study phrasal verbs- draft

We all know studying these infamous phrasal verbs is hard. They are not intuitive. we are misled by the familiar-looking verb and the often also familiar preposition or adverb proceeding it. but the combination, the order and the context etc make it all an ardous task to learn and above all, use, unless there is no other alternative: like with break down for example.

What to look at in order to learn and teach PV more rationally and hopefully more effectively.
subject person or thing
object? separable or not? 
with or without preposition- put this up vs  put me up,   put up with this. and order
meanings, order, and always be very open to other meanings, whether it is is Brit, or Am English and variations.
if what you think you know doesn't fit the context, always check.  --> dictionary skills -->how to find the right translation (words and translations, more than words as meaning)

multiple ways to learn them:
by topic - learn them in that context, in that order you see them
by preposotion /adverb, without a context other than examples and explanation
by verb