Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Personal Pronouns and the Present Perfect

I met with two students today. One is an advanced ESL learner. I've been working with her for about a year. Much of the grammar we work on is review. Our major focus is conversation skills, accent reduction and pronunciation (mostly medical terms, as she is a Registered Nurse). I noticed some difficulty with Personal Pronouns, so we are reviewing them by using Azar's Understanding and Using English Grammar, chapter 8, "Pronouns." My student had some problems with the first exercise (mostly an assessment tool). We proceeded with Section 8-1, Personal Pronouns. This section provides a chart with subject pronouns, object pronouns, possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives. We also practiced identifying antecedents.

I remember having difficulty, myself, with pronouns when I studied Spanish. Memorization of each of the pronouns is necessary. This can be accomplished through written exercises (and sometimes has to be, otherwise, some students try to avoid using pronouns in spoken English) and verbal drills.

The second English language learner I tutored today is at a high beginner level. It's been 10 years since she studied English in high school in Korea. We've been working together for a couple of months. Today's lesson included the Present Perfect. I used Murphy's Basic Grammar in Use, unit 16, "Have you ever...?" I also introduced some new vocabulary phrases dealing with restaurants ("Do you take plastic?" "I'd like a doggy bag," etc.). Homework is to create a dialog between a diner and a server. (I developed this lesson plan a couple of years ago when I was studying for my TESOL certificate.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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