Tuesday, January 15, 2008

ING/ED

Here's another doosey! Slight grammatical differences when conjugating can be frustrating for someone studying English. Smith’s School of English aim to practice the different usages in natural conversational setting so our students won't be so frustrated. Hey! That's a pretty good example right there.

Let's use this space to discuss lessons dealing with this useful grammar point!

-Gavin

2 comments:

SJ said...

The first class of the day and I had the pleasure of teaching a student that I hadn’t seen in quite a while. As soon as she entered the classroom, looking rather tired, she said to me, “long time no see!” This surprised me because she had still held onto that phrase during her long absence.

She needed to go slowly to recap what she had learnt before because she a was a bit rusty so I took extra care making sure that she was following along. We were doing ING/ED adjectives and she had forgotten most of them. She was looking pretty disappointed in herself and becoming timid so I made a demonstration for each of the cards, putting a lot of emphasis into the feeling behind each adjective. Gradually, as we went through them, she began to gain momentum, more readily supplying her own examples as we progressed.

By the end, she was very excited and relieved that she had been able to finish the lesson with more confidence and energy than she had entered with. She even began to ask questions about some adjectives that weren’t a part of the lesson. I added a few new words to her vocab as well, based on her particular interests and activities. She found these to be very useful and was very happy that I had remembered so much about her, even though she hadn’t been able to come to lessons for a while due to overtime at work.

Wendy said...

Student care is so important in this job! Language learning is not easy for anyone and it can be extremely frustrating at times. Encouragement and patience from a coach usually make a big difference.