Unit 1
An impressive English lesson
1 If
I
am
the
only
parent
who
still
corrects
his
child's
English,
then
perhaps
my
son
is
right. To
him,
I
am
a tedious oddity:
a
father
he
is
obliged to
listen
to
and
a
man absorbed in the rules of grammar, which my son seems allergic to.
2 I think I got serious about this only recently when I ran into one of my former students,
fresh from an excursion to Europe. "How was it?" I asked, full of earnest anticipation.
3 She
nodded
three
or
four
times,
searched
the
heavens
for
the
right
words,
and
then exclaimed, "It was, like, whoa!"
4 And
that
was
it. The civilization of
Greece
and
the
glory
of
Roman architecture were captured in
a condensed non-statement. My
student's
"whoa!"
was exceeded only by my head-shaking distress.
5 There are many different stories about the downturn in the proper use of English. Surely
students
should
be
able
to distinguish
between
their
/
there
/
they're
or
the distinctive difference
between
complimentary
and
complementary
. They
unfairly
bear
the bulk of the criticism for these
knowledge deficits because
there is a
sense
that they
should know better.
6 Students are not dumb, but they are being misled everywhere they look and listen. For
example,
signs
in grocery stores
point
them
to
the
stationary
,
even
though
the
actual
stationery
items
鈥?/p>
pads, albums and
notebooks
鈥?/p>
are
not
nailed
down. Friends
and loved ones often proclaim they've just
ate
when, in fact, they've just
eaten
. Therefore,
it doesn't make any sense to criticize our students.
7 Blame for the scandal of this language deficit should be thrust upon our schools, which
should be setting high standards of English language proficiency. Instead, they only teach
a
little
grammar
and
even
less
advanced
vocabulary. Moreover,
the
younger
teachers
themselves evidently have little knowledge of these vital structures of language because
they also went without exposure to them. Schools fail to adequately teach
the
essential
framework of language, accurate grammar and proper vocabulary, while they should take
the responsibility of pushing the young onto the path of competent communication.
8 Since grammar is boring to most of the young students, I think that it must be handled
delicately, step by step. The chance came when one day I was driving with my son. As we
set
out
on
our
trip,
he
noticed
a
bird
in jerky flight
and
said,
"It's
flying
so
unsteady." I
carefully
asked,
"My
son,
how
is
the
bird
flying?" "What's
wrong?
Did
I
say
anything
incorrectly?" He got lost. "Great! You said
incorrectly
instead of
incorrect
. We use adverbs
to describe verbs. Therefore, it's flying so
unsteadily
but not so
unsteady
."
9 Curious about my correction, he asked me what an adverb was. Slowly, I said, "It's a
word that tells you something about a verb." It led to his asking me what a verb was. I
explained, "Verbs are action words; for example, Dad drives the truck.
Drive
is the verb
because it's the thing Dad is doing."
10 He became attracted to the idea of action words, so we listed a few more:
fly, swim,
dive, run
. Then, out of his own curiosity, he asked me if other words had names for their
use and functions. This led to a discussion of nouns, adjectives, and articles. Within the
span of a 10-minute drive, he had learned from scratch to the major parts of speech in a