In-Class Assignment, Jan. 23rd

In-class assignment:

Now that we have gotten acquainted with AAE, we are going to learn about the language peculiarities of another special sub-group of our future students.

Task 1: Pick a partner, and proofread the sample text below. Try to underline and correct as many mistakes as you can find.


The Beijing is a modern city and there are a lot of places to visit. First, there are many new building was build. One of the new buildings, it looks like a bird’s nest. Then, it have a big history. You can visit a lot of old buildings to know the history, just like “the summer Palace”. Finally, many people come from different country, there are kinds of restaurant. You can eat which you want to taste. Beijing is a nice place.


Task 2: With your partner, create a list of specific errors that occurred. Group these errors into categories.

Here is an example for a category: modifiers

In Chinese, modifiers always precede the noun, whereas in English they can follow the noun, especially for attributive clauses. Therefore, Chinese students often have problems constructing an attributive clause. For example:

· Their owners may want to come to the store knows the pets better.
· These are all good strategies should be used.
· There are some people want to live in the countryside.
· The Plan provides lots of good statistic numbers which very helpful.
· My grandfather is the only person who influenced by his actions.

Another category: pronouns

One salient error is the leaving out of the relative pronouns, because they don’t exist in Chinese. For instance, the first sentence, if written in Chinese, would belike: “Their owners may want to come to knows the pets better the store.”

To find more categories, take the following ERIC document for help. (Look only on pp. 47-62 for specific error types.)


Task 3: Pick one of your categories, or one category mentioned on pp. 47-62, and write a short passage how you as a teacher/tutor/editor would explain to an Asian writer WHY this can’t be said in English. Give plausible examples of right/wrong sentences, and explain to the ESL student how to use the grammatical form you picked correctly. Email this to me (if you do it as a pair, write both your names in the email.)

Example:
In a case study, a Costa Rican boy used the “the” too often, for example, “the nature has a lot of secrets.” The teacher replies: “Let me ask you, if you are walking in the woods, where is nature?” – “It’s in the trees. It’s kind of … everywhere,” the student replies. “Right. It’s everywhere. So nature is a very general noun. We talk about nature but we are not talking about a specific place or specific trees…” (Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman 1983, 9-10).