Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Simple Past Tense and Adverbs of Time

Simple past tense is formed by using the past tense of the verb. 
Be careful; don't use the past participle. 
Look at the verb forms in these sentences:

I drink coffee. Drink is the base form of the verb.
I drank coffee yesterday. Drank is the past tense form of the verb.
I have drunk too much coffee. Drunk is the past participle form of the verb. Past participles can also be used as adjectives, as we know from the phrase, "My drunk friend thinks you're cute."
You can't say, "Yesterday I drunk coffee," or "I drunk too much coffee," because that is wrong.

When do we use simple past? We use simple past to talk about actions that began and ended at a specific time in the past. To use simple past correctly, it's important to give the time the action happened by using an adverb of time. In these examples, the simple past tense verbs are red and the adverbs of time are blue.

Please click here to watch the video version of this lesson! You can leave a comment and I'll respond to you in an upcoming video.



Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Basic English Grammar: Simple Present Tense and Adverbs of Frequency

 It's super easy to form simple present tense. Include a noun and a verb, conjugate the verb correctly and there you have it! 



When do we use simple present tense? Well, baby books use it.



But grown-ups only use it to talk about the way something is, using the verb "to be," or something that happens all the time, or regularly.

I am a reality TV star. I get up at six o'clock every day to get my hair and make-up done. I work out at the gym with my own personal trainer. I do duck face and take selfies. I rarely eat

We don't use simple present to talk about something we're doing right now. For that, we generally use present continuing, also called present progressive tense.

I'll talk more about present progressive (or continuing) tense later.


We can add adverbs of frequency to our simple present tense sentences.


Here's a continuum showing some adverbs of frequency. Always means 100 percent of the time, and never of course means zero percent of the time. You can see how the other adverbs of frequency can be used to tell you how often I do something, or how frequently something takes place.

Always can mean every day, or whenever the opportunity arises. So when I say, "I always eat cookies," it doesn't mean I eat cookies 24/7, although that would be nice; it means whenever I get the chance, I eat cookies.




Sunday, October 11, 2015

How to Kick IB Language A: Literature Part 1: Written Assignment's Butt -- Step 3

For Step 1 of the Written Assignment, click here. For Step 2, click here

Step 3 is called Developing the Topic - Supervised Writing

Your teacher will give you a few writing prompts at the beginning of the supervised writing session. These prompts are designed to help you think about and develop a topic for your written assignment.

Your school will keep your supervised writing on file, and the IB assessment board might ask to see it later, but it is not sent in or assessed. Use it to come up with an independent topic and title for your essay. 


As you can imagine, when examiners are marking two hundred essays, they won't be impressed if they see the same generic topics over and over again. Try to come up with something unique and personal. A question that you had about the work makes an excellent topic, since you have been working to answer that question since step one. As you write your Supervised Writing, you should use it to consider and explore a few topics.

Here is an example from the International Baccalaureate Organization teacher support materials:

Prompt: How does the writer convey a sense of time passing in the work? This is a general prompt that your teacher might give you. 

You can now customize it according to the work you read and your ideas generated in the Interactive Oral and Reflective Statement.

Let's say you read the work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Apply the prompt above to this work.

You might come up with a title like: "The significance of time for Shukhov in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." This is a specific title derived from applying the prompt to the work studied. 
Nardvark doesn't realize it, but he's doing a great job of personalizing
the work he's studying. 

Now think about your questions raised and explored in the Interactive Oral and Reflective Statement. In this work, Solzhenitsyn seems to be using a short time span of one day to show the monotony of the seemingly endless days for the prisoner. Thus you might adjust your title to "The Significance of Time for Shukhov in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: How One Day can Symbolize 3,653 Days." 

Looks good! You now have a specific title and subtitle. Now you just have to go on to Step 4: Production of the Essay, which we'll look more closely at next time.

Thanks for reading! Check my ABOUT page to learn more about me, and click on my STUDY BREAK page if you're ready to spend a few minutes doing something more fun than work, work, work!


Monday, October 5, 2015

Correcting the Internet with Mrs. Teacher: Parts of Speech


Watch the corresponding video on YouTube
Parts of Speech
Today we're going to look at parts of speech. If you've ever been to school, this is a review for you. But I can't talk to you about the complexities of language until I remind you of the basics.
First we've got the noun. 
Click to go to Merriam-Webster's definition of "noun"
A noun is a word that is the name of something. It can be a...
Person
Animal
Place
Thing
Quality
Idea
Action

So... teacher is a noun. That's me; I'm a person. And cat is a noun, obviously, a cat is an animal. Mexico is a noun. It's a proper noun, because it's the actual name of a place. Banana is a noun; it's a thing. Excitement is a noun, a quality of every English student, right? Existentialism is a noun. It's an idea which you'll find out more about when you read Camus. And finally, shopping is a noun. What did you do yesterday? I went shopping.

Did you know that nouns are usually the first parts of speech that babies use? 

So the next important part of speech is the verb.
Click to go to Merriam-Webster's definition of "verb."

You know a verb is an action word, like run or eat. Don't forget to be is also a verb; it expresses a state of being. And have is also a verb. There's no actual action, like run, but it expresses an occurrence.
 So now that we have nouns and verbs, we can make sentences. All you need for a sentence is two words: a noun and a verb.
Yes, this is a sentence.
This is a really short, but perfectly legit sentence:


Now we can pad it out with some other parts of speech.




You've got your adjectives, used to describe nouns:

You've got your adverbs, used to describe verbs :











And you've got your pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, and articles. 
pronoun
preposition
conjunction
interjection
article


Sunday, October 4, 2015

How to Kick IB Language A: Literature Part 1: Written Assignment's Butt -- Step 2

School goes on, and if you're in IB Literature, you're probably working your way through the Written Assignment.  Go HERE for step 1.  By now you should be ready for:

Step 2: The Reflective Statement

This is an in-class assignment, so naturally, most students panic at the thought of it. But it's not that difficult, really. You have your notes from the Interactive Oral to guide you.  So do some deep-breathing exercises and have at 'er!
THE INTERACTIVE ORAL: More than just a chance
to laugh at your classmates' funny pronunciation!  

A couple points to remember:

1. Stick to the guiding question: “How was your understanding of cultural and contextual considerations of the work developed through the interactive oral?” -- Let's analyze this. 
  • Look at the essential question: "How was your understanding... developed...?" So in your reflective statement, you have to describe the process by which your personal understanding was developed, or changed/improved. Understanding of what? "of cultural and contextual considerations of the work..."
  • Cultural: You're dealing with a work written in translation. Think about the place, time, society of the character and/or author's culture. For example, if you read Perfume by Patrick Süskind, you need to think about 18th century France. Will it help you to know about Germany in 1985? Considering that was Suskind's culture, perhaps. It might give you some insight to consider the political environment Suskind was writing in.  Which brings us to...
  • Contextual: Think about the background of the author and characters and the themes of the work. Perfume is about filth, smell, class division, and, obviously, perfume. What do you know about these things? What do your classmates know? 
  • The last part of the question is "...through the interactive oral." That's why you had to really listen to your classmates' ideas and take good notes. Now explain how your discussion enhanced your understanding.



2. This will be assessed by IB examiners. Use the writing process to develop it. Make full use of the time you are given. Remember the word count: 300 - 400 words. That's not very many words, really. One or two pages, depending on the size of your handwriting. You've written Facebook comments longer than that. Just think of it as writing around 25 Tweets. You can do that in your lunch break. The point is, you have plenty of time to think about and plan out exactly what you're going to write, and then to re-read what you wrote several times, revising and editing it to perfection. That's how you're going to get the awesome marks on your Reflective Statement.