Miscellaneous Common Mistakes Among Advanced English Learners

Dec 10, 2011 Libby Wilson

This article explains small errors which are common among people who speak English well. In avoiding these, the learners will sound more like a native.

 

As stated in an article on common English errors made by Indians, "With all its irregularities, exceptions and rules, English is a very difficult language to master." Even people who speak very good English sometimes phrase their sentences in a way which gives away the fact that it isn't their first language. The following are some of those mistakes, and an explanation of how to say them in a more 'native-like' way.

Compound Adjectives with Numbers

Common examples: a five-year-old boy, a two-week holiday
Nigel J Ross, teacher in the City of Milan School for Interpreters and Translators, concedes that numbers are very frequent in these 'Double-Barrelled Adjectives.' What English learners need to remember is that compound adjectives are invariable. That means that the word after the number does not become plural.

• Ninety-Mile beach, *Ninety-Miles beach
• A thirty-minute speech, *a thirty-minutes speech

If unsure about whether the word is an adjective, try taking it out and putting something like 'long' or 'short' in its place.

• I was in the train for five hours *I was in the train for long
• It was a five-hour train ride It was a long train ride

Have the Possibility of
While people understand this phrasing, it doesn't quite sound natural! A better phrase to use would be 'had the chance to.'

• *I had the possibility to do an internship in New Zealand
• I had the chance to do an internship in New Zealand

Quantifiers: Much/Many or A Lot?
When to use 'much' as opposed to 'a lot' can be difficult... for those who haven't visited the Woodward Chile site and heard about this simple rule: much is only used in negative sentences, and questions.

*You have done much today!
You have done a lot today!

It is possible to say 'I don't have a lot of friends,' (even Angelina Jolie says it) but it would be more common to say 'I don't have many friends.'

Possessives Using 'The [Noun] of [Name]'

Common examples: The mother of my girlfriend said, this is the car of my brother.
In general, English speakers opt for using the apostrophe+s form of showing possession, as it is a much quicker way to get the message across.

From time to time, especially when expressing more complex relationships, the longer form may be used.
For example, 'That was the mother of one of my students.' However, it is also possible to say 'That was one of my students' mothers.'

Have You Ever ...?

Now is the time to use everyone's favourite tense: the present perfect. Despite being loathed by English-learners all over the world, it is actually a very useful tense for making small talk. So, when striking up conversation with a new acquaintance, don't ask 'Were you ever in Fiji?', but rather 'Have you ever been to Fiji?' When they start coming back with questions, the answer is 'Yes, I have' or 'No, I haven't.'
As Rodger Woodham states on the BBC World Learning English site, the present perfect is often used with adverbs but, in sentences like the ones above, "yet is understood but not used." Therefore, this construction is useful for any situation where a speaker is asking whether, up until this moment in their life, a person has done or tried something.

For example, 'have you ever bungee-jumped?'

Speaking a foreign language is no easy task, and comes little by little. However, by working to eliminate common errors and clearing up doubts about confusing pairs, learners can sound considerably more like native speakers.

Copyright Libby Wilson. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.

Web Tutors Become Stars Far From Classroom

Web Tutors Become Stars Far From Classroom

By D.D. GUTTENPLAN

Published: December 11, 2011

 LONDON — Not that long ago Salman Khan thought YouTube was only “for cats playing the piano. No place for serious mathematics.” With more than 3.5 million students watching his educational videos every month, the founder of Khan Academy has long since changed his mind.

 

While living in Boston Mr. Khan began the online academy as a way of tutoring his cousins in New Orleans in mathematics. It has grown exponentially, helped by hordes of grateful parents whose dim memories of algebra or trigonometry are not enough to help with their children’s homework. While Khan Academy is the most widely known, there are a host of similar Web sites aimed at students and teachers.

When Bill Gates told the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival that he watched Khan Academy videos with his children, the site’s traffic spiked higher overnight. At the time Mr. Khan was still making short films out of a closet in his home. Nine months after taking a year off from his job as a hedge fund analyst, he was “beginning to think about polishing my résumé.”

Instead, with backing from the Gates Foundation and Google, whose $2 million donation is paying for his material to be translated into 10 languages, Mr. Khan now hopes to change the way students learn from kindergarten all the way to graduate school. Mr. Khan calls his revolutionary idea “the flip” and the basic premise — that classroom lectures followed by homework followed by exams is a recipe for educational failure — is gaining momentum.

“If I just want to tell you stuff, a lecture is very useful, but if I really want you to learn something it’s not that useful,” said Richard Baraniuk, professor of electrical engineering at Rice University and founder of Connexions , an open source Web site for college textbooks. Though Mr. Baraniuk prefers the term “reverse instruction,” he sees Khan Academy as fitting into an approach pioneered by Carl Wieman, a Nobel laureate in physics serving as an adviser to the White House. In a paper titled “Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Scientific Education? ”

Mr. Wieman cited data showing that students who take an introductory physics course typically know less physics when they finish — and that “if anything, the effect of taking an introductory college chemistry course is even worse.” Traditional teaching methods simply do not allow “enough time to develop the long-term memory structures required for subject mastery,” Mr. Wieman wrote.

Mr. Khan agrees. “In a traditional classroom, what’s fixed is the amount of time you spend on a subject. The variable is how well you learn it,” he said during an interview on Skype. “But when you think about all the things you learn outside a classroom — riding a bike, sports, playing an instrument — what you want to achieve is a certain mastery.”

There is nothing flashy about Mr. Khan’s path to mastery. The earliest videos, such as the one devoted to finding the least common multiple , show a blank chalkboard slowly filling with jerky figures while Mr. Khan’s voice explains the problem. More recent examples, like the one on the physics behind hitting a baseball over the Green Monster , the fabled baseball outfield wall at Fenway Park in Boston, move a little more briskly. None of them show Mr. Khan’s face, yet they have made him an object of devotion. “I started getting letters saying ‘My family prays for you every month,”’ he said. “Remember, I was working at a hedge fund.”

The videos, however, are only the beginning. From the start Mr. Khan was writing software that allowed him to track the progress his cousins were making. Underlying the whole enterprise is a “knowledge map ” — a chart offering exercises leading, step by step, from simple addition to linear algebra. In a speech last month, Mr. Khan explained: “Each square is a different concept. The videos are there if you need help. The idea is you keep doing the problems till you’ve mastered the concept, and then you go on to the next concept. It’s how every video game works.”

The software lets teachers and parents see where students excel — and where they need help.
Invited to pilot his approach by the Los Altos, California, public school district, Mr. Khan discovered that students were able to progress further and with more confidence by “flipping” the sequence of activities — asking students to try the problems online before class, and then having teachers work individually or in small groups on just those areas students found difficult.

“But they were all still working in lockstep,” he said, adding that ideally “you would have students all working at their own pace,” helping each other in class and online, allowing the teachers to use class time far more effectively.
Some critics have claimed Mr. Khan is trying to make teachers obsolete. “That’s not what we’re about,” he responded.

Marshall Smith, who served as undersecretary of education in the Clinton Administration, said that technology “gives teachers room to go deeper.” Recently retired as program officer of the Hewlett Foundation, Mr. Smith is an admirer of Khan Academy. But he warned that innovation would not come easily.

“There are a lot of higher education institutions where the teaching just isn’t very good, where the teachers rattle on as they’ve been doing for years, and where, especially in the sciences, the teachers just don’t keep up,” he said.

 

Helping teachers to keep up was one of the driving forces behind PhET, a Web site at the University of Colorado founded by Mr. Weiman that uses interactive computer simulations to teach physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences. Initially aimed at college students, PhET, which stands for Physics Education Technology, attracts 25 million visitors a year. Like Khan Academy lectures, the simulations “can be used off-line,” said Katherine Perkins, the project’s director. “We have schools in rural Africa where they don’t have an Internet connection, where teachers use our material,” she said. PhET also lets anyone adapt or incorporate their material under a creative commons license.

Mr. Smith said the effect has been “pretty egalitarian. This gives everybody a shot at understanding science, even if they don’t have X dollars to spend.”

He also sees a need much closer to home. “You have community colleges where the students work all day, then drag themselves to class pretty exhausted.”

Mr. Baraniuk argues that anything beyond the first few rows is “distance learning.”

“If you have a class of 250 students, the first three rows are getting a high quality experience,” he said. “Everybody else is just watching.”

For Mr. Baraniuk, a key issue is quality control. “PhEt happens to be founded by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. So he probably knows physics,” he said. “And if you loved Sal Khan’s algebra you’ll probably love his geometry.

Connexions is open to anybody who wants to submit material” — a strategy Mr. Baraniuk calls “in-reach.”
“We’re enlisting professional societies,” he said.

Mr. Khan has recently broadened his curriculum to include art history, civics, history, and “micro- and macroeconomics, drawing on my hedge-fund experience.” And he has taken a different approach, allowing users to post comments. Urging students to bring “a healthy dose of skepticism — this is just one point of view,” Mr. Khan seems content to rely on the wisdom of crowds. “Our material isn’t just reviewed by Americans, or a few professors. It’s been reviewed by the world,” he said.

Spelling, the Lost Art

Nov 22, 2011 by Sharon Dellorco

Article pulled from http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=932714266&gid=66995&type=member&item=81781747&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fsharon-dellorco%2Esuite101%2Ecom%2Fspelling-the-lost-art-a397283&urlhash=IBda&goback=%2Egde_66995_member_81781747

Remembering when shortcuts, spell-checks and self-correction was not available for business/academia and the effectivity of an online spelling program.

As a writer, I am used to dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s; literally. I learned early on…really early on that spelling correctly has its advantages. I mean as early on and as far back as “the typewriter”. Most of you reading this article may have heard of such, and I can almost bet that a lot of you have not “typed” on one. Before the days of the “self-correcting IBM Selectric” (I’m hearing, huh…what is THAT? Never mind, but what an invention!), there were these typewriters. What it did upon the strike of the letter you wanted, was that a piece of metal with that particular letter literally hops out of the machine, and makes an impression of the letter, striking a piece of ribbon that had carbon on one side. When you were typing a letter (as in a document), and if you made a typo, or a spelling error, you had to retype the whole letter. Then, after the wonderful invention of Liquid Paper, you would dab on some white paint-like liquid over the letter error, wait for this to dry, then, try to match up exactly where the mistake happened, and restrike the letter onto the dried patch of paper. Very early on in my career, I worked for a man who would put the document up to a light, or a window and IF there were any patches of Liquid Paper, felt that this was unprofessional and had me retype the whole letter…over and over until I got it right. Without a typo, and without a patch of Liquid Paper; call it Letterwriting Bootcamp!

Spelling Correctly - What a Concept

I suppose my background has me well-trained in this concept called learn to spell. What worries me about the new generation, and by that I mean the very new, text message-oriented generation is that spelling is a lost art. Rarely do you see the word “through” written out; it is now “thru”. One doesn’t even see the word “see” anymore; it is “c”. That’s it. In the interest of time, not only do I understand why this is done, but I practice this method myself. The problem still exists that in the written word; books, newspapers, even e-books, e-news, and SCHOOL, one is still expected to spell - and spell correctly.

How DO You Learn How to Spell?

It is then that I started researching out different methods that children are learning how to spell properly. Is one spelling program or method better than the next? Honestly, I don’t think English is an easy language to spell; like learning how to read, one successful way of learning how to spell is repetitive memorization of words, and sight learning. There are lists of the most commonly used words in the English language; the first 100, 200 and so on. Older kids, younger kids have to learn this way. In my opinion, it is at this younger stage that it’s so important that these “commonly used” spelling words are ingrained. There are certainly phonetic approaches, but when those rules don’t apply, nothing beats just knowing how a word should be spelled. I stumbled across a program called ClickN SPELL by a company called, ClickN KIDS. It is an impressive program that teaches the 800 most commonly used words in the English language. The online program was written by a research professor with impressive accolades, and from what I’ve seen and heard, it works. I tried it myself (because I will try out what I write about), and found the program to be very user friendly, and entertaining enough for kids through 5th grade, as well as any adult with any variation of learning difficulties.

I was very happy to see that there is a spelling program that goes beyond “See Spot Run”, but in fact goes through teaching as many words as they do. I understand that this program is also used in schools, and is aligned with core curricula. I hope that a correctly spelled document always stays important, even if a document doesn’t have to be done over and over until there are no white blots on that piece of paper when it’s put against the light or a window.

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