Teach English in Songshu Zhen - Wuwei Shi

This unit took me a while to study. Even as a native English speaker, grammar is not my strong point. Though I have always used correct grammar in my oral and written work I've never been able to explain the what, the how, the why. So it's good to have this clear and concise breakdown complete with examples. Certain points brought back my own learning as a child in an English school. For example, a followed by a consonant and an followed by a vowel or a consonant sound (for example a united nation). However I have been able to increase the depth of this knowledge as I now know that these indefinite articles only apply to singular nouns (Something I applied but did not know). The same is said for verbs, I used to love learning about 'doing' words, but here I learn that there are action verbs and state verbs. Again, something that I never knew I knew, learning not only the names of transitive and intransitive verbs but how to use them. I question also the verb promise which is listed as intransitive but which we often use as transitive: I promise you. Perhaps this is an example of a verb which can be used as either or, or, perhaps it is a common error amongst native speakers. I'm delighted to learn about auxilary verbs and use the example I have been to Italy twice. This is the type of thing that would catch me out reveal that teacher in this case is not the 'fountain of all knowledge' because I was quite simply unable to answer the use of 'have been'. Moving onto adverbs, I Wonder if there are more adverbs than those listed? I only knew about ly adverbs and I'm quite frankly astounded to learn that so many of the words that I use so freely are in fact, adverbs (above, recently, really, once...) The use of adverbs whilst clearly explained in their basic use, either after the object of a transitive verb or immediateley after instransitive verbs, still remains unclear to me as there are many overlaps between them and prépositions. I hope that it will be explained in a later chapter how to figure out if it's an adverb or a preposition. For one, so that I can delay less in my response to question 6 (crossing my fingers and hoping it's the right answer in this instance) and decipher for myself and eventually communicate the correct usage to my more Advanced students. In the first part of the chapter I learnt the names for the different types of nouns, which I always treated correctly but without knowing into which category it fell. To me they were all just nouns. I feel that this further knowledge will create richer learning opportunities for my students. I'm also glad that I'll be able to give a basic rule regarding the order of clusters of adjectives, ableit not set in stone. I've often queried this and now find I have to answer. I learnt about comparatives and superlatives a few years back though never did I find a clear explanation as to why we place more and most before certain adjectives. However, this section could possibly go into slightly more detail about comparatives. On the British Council learnenglish website there are examples of implicit comparisons: eg. We need a bigger garden (implied than the one we have) and the use of double comparatives to highlight changes in a person or a thing: eg. the balloon got bigger and bigger. Jumping back to articles, when discussing the use of indefinite articles for plural nouns there is a brief mention of a new concept, some being a determining adjective. This tittilates my curiosity and I hope I will learn about this in the later units. The gerund is again a new concept for me. Something never quite sat right with me when I answered (wrongly I now might add) to students that in the sentence I enjoy skiing, the word skiing was use of the present continuous. Ai, ai ai! Now it all makes sense! To sum up, I feel I've gained a wealth of knowledge about some of the more basic grammatical questions of the English language, but it's left me with more questions which I'm hoping will be answered at a later point in my training.