Hurrah! Susan. I can't speak for others, but I didn't want to steal yr
thunder :)



At 10:56 AM 6/27/00 -0500, you wrote:
>At 6/26/00, Ruth wrote:
>
>>So many times I want to ask things like, "Just how DO you conjugate a verb?"
>
>I was amazed, as I looked through my mail this last few minutes, how many
>people commented on your question without attempting to answer it.
>
>In my French class, when we were taught different verb forms and different
>verb tenses, my teacher would put a chart on the board for each tense.  It
>would have two columns and 3 rows.  The column headings would be for
>singular, and the second would be for plural.  The three row headings would
>be for 1st person, 2nd person, and third person.  If your e-mail lines up
>the same as mine, it would look something like this:
>
>
>                                        singular
plural
>
>1st person              (I)                                             (we)
>2nd person              (you)                                   (you)
>3rd person              (he/she/it)                             (they)
>
>
>We would then fill in the appropriate verb forms for whatever tense we were
>working on.  In English, you is the same for singular and plural, but in
>French, it is different.  I simply explain that to the kids, and they know
>that the two forms for "you" will always be the same.
>
>For the word be, in the present tense, the chart would look like this:
>
>
>                                        singular
plural
>
>1st person:             I am                                    we are
>2nd person:             you are                                 you are
>3rd person:             (s)he is
they are
>
>Although I did talk to my high school students about this (freshman), I
>never had done anything like it myself outside of a foreign language class,
>and don't consider it a major task that kids should learn.  However, it
>does sometimes help them to analyze what they are doing when they write
>sentences.  Once they figure out how the different slots work, they can
>simply think to themselves how they would say something in a formal setting
>(for those who typically use a non-standard dialect, but are familiar with
>how their teachers usually talk), and they can generally figure out which
>words go in which slots.
>
>
>They do tend to get past tense and past participles mixed up, especially if
>they speak a non-standard dialect.  Conjugating verbs in past tense, and
>also in the perfect and progressive tenses (especially past perfect and
>past progressive), comparing the feel of these different kinds of tenses
>and how they affect the meaning, can help kids make sense of why using a
>participle instead of past tense can be inappropriate in formal english.
>
>As far as the perfect and progressive tenses, I always forget which is
>which (have to look it up in my textbooks, but generally think that the
>ability to use them is more important than knowing the names), but they are
>the forms of verbs that use "be" and "have":  I am writing, I was writing,
>I will be writing, I had written, I have written, I had been writing, I
>have been writing, etc.
>
>I tend to use a lot of visual aids in my teaching, and try to connect what
>I teach to things they are already familiar with.  I also tend to use a lot
>of sentence structure imitation in my teaching, which helps build up an
>implicit understanding of language in a playful manner.  I think that the
>formal sentence diagramming in textbooks is too complicated (I also never
>did that in school) to teach the kinds of things I teach, but I have used
>an adapted form of it to show relationships of thought units in a sentence,
>especially with compound structures.
>
>
>Susan Mari Witt
>
>
>
>240 ERML, MC-051
>1201 W. Gregory
>Urbana, IL  61801
>
>Phone:  (217) 333-1965
>Fax:      (217) 333-4777
>
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>


Judith Diamondstone  (732) 932-7496  Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183