I wonder if anyone else dreams about object pronouns and possessive determiners? I guess such nightly tussles are one of the hazards of what I do, all the writing and teaching muddles my brain with an excess of prancing words.
Sometimes this quarantine feels like being buried in grammar books
I began my sojourn in England studying for the CELTA. Since my return, I have been teaching students from the total beginner whose English consisted of a few song lyrics to the advanced student whose speaking skills surpass some non-native teachers I’ve worked with. I don’t, therefore, start with a list of grammatical concepts that I will teach week-by-week; I respond to the grammatical problems my students face in that moment. This means that having recognized a student has a problem and that this is a persistent problem I go from class to grammar book and back again.
Sometimes students say things that simply don’t sound right, but I have no idea why. I record their phrasing and then try to break their structures apart, refer to the grammar books, conduct a search of the Internet, compare American and British forms and see what I can do about creating some form of exercise for the student to practise with. In the midst of this, I dream.
Everyone seems to have their own idea of what’s right
A lot of my challenges come from the way many grammarians have historically discussed the English language. Everyone has their own take. Consulting my books I discover there are several perspectives on the gerund: Scott Thornbury suggests, for example, that we don’t use the word gerund, but use the phrase ‘ing form’; John Seely’s account of the gerund is ‘see verbal noun’; those oft-quoted Americans, Strunk and White, are sticklers who (in their rule 10) state that a gerund requires a possessive pronoun whereas a verbal participle requires an objective pronoun; Seeley says that 90 per cent of the time people use an object pronoun before a verbal noun… Don’t fret, it is irrelevant whether, or not, you understand that last sentence. All I wish to convey is that the books disagree.
One of the consequences of having so many perspectives on a core feature of the English language is that each of my students comes to me with a different set of terminology. In English, a gerund is a noun. However, the word gerundio in Spanish refers to a participle which functions as a verb (or sometimes an adverb) but never as a noun. If my students should start trying to solve this terminology problem by themselves, they will run into confusion.
It’s provided me with a headache
Another conflict occurs between my English and the English that my students are trying to learn, and which, ideally, I am trying to teach. Sometimes I hesitate in the middle of a sentence having realized that I’ve switched a was for a were, an I for a me, or a progressive participle for a past participle as in ‘I was sat’… which is dialectically not incorrect, but nor is it helpful for the student. I stop, explain and correct my mistake. What I would love, is if someone could give me a glossary of terms I use in weird ways, so that I knew where I was leading my students astray.
As I have no such guide, I find myself in an investigation into how I personally speak
The process of trying to understand my idiolect can make me sound quite idiotic. I’m not talking to myself like a human, I’m parroting phrases back to myself. I repeat myself with slight changes in emphasis and phoneme, attempting to pronounce what I say naturally, whilst aware of what I’m doing makes me change how I speak and, hence, sabotages the experiment. As a result, I replicate my uncertainties, going over and over the same combinations of words, and not getting very far at all. Modelling the language is nigh impossible if you’re overthinking it. Especially if you’re not the most confident in your pronunciation in the first place. I fear confusing my students. This fear, it seems, leads to weird dreams.
If you felt like this text lacked examples:
- Building houses is hard work: a gerund and a noun.
- A house is a building: a non-gerund noun.
- I am building a house: a verb as a present participle in the present continuous.
- I was building a house: a past continuous form of the verb which (and this makes total sense) uses a present participle.
And as for the title… if you got that ‘dreaming of grammar’ is a gerund phrase (or should we call that a verbal-noun phrase) but ‘making’ is a verb then you’re doing well.
gerund
