• Leading Student to Understand It
                                    •  He It is easy to do math.
                                    • Was raining at noon.

(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

Pointing to this sentence: “It started raining during the game,” Sylvia asked me what the word “it” was. “How can I know when to use it?”

I told her the grammar term for it (‘non-referential it’), but I didn’t tell her any rules. Instead, I led her to understanding it through a set of inductive exercises. This meant that she “formulated the rule” correctly on her own by working with examples.

Some typical problems students have with this are when they write sentences like these:
• Was raining after work.
• He is easy to do math.

Inductive exercises to lead students to understand non-referential “It” as the subject of a sentence.

(This post includes a short form of the exercises. On the handout in the link below, you can see more items for each exercise.) Notice: This does NOT involve any TEACHER TALKING.

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(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)*

This posting is an update of a post from September 2019: Mistake: He surprised to see it snowing. (Adjectives that look like verbs)

Back in my high school days, learning my first foreign language, French, I remember often hearing the teacher say, “You’ll just need to memorize this.”

Fortunately, the art of teaching foreign languages, including ESL, has come a long way from those “just memorizing” days. We understand the importance of comprehensible input and the effectiveness of engaging with new concepts and vocabulary in multiple contexts.

To illustrate this, I’d like to refer to a posting from 2019, in which I discussed a common mistake that ESL students make with adjectives that look like verbs. Instead of telling students that they need to memorize these words, we lead them to internalizing these though a series of four exercises. By the end of these, students tend to remember because the words“sound” right rather than wracking their brains searching for what they had been told.

When students see an –ed at the end of a word, they tend to automatically assume it’s a verb, and this assumption can lead them to grammar mistakes.

(* mistakes—These sentences are missing a verb.)
*Kai embarrassed during his speech.
* Rumi interested in horses.

To help students in the most efficient manner, I will sometimes paint with a broad brush.  So I simply tell my students that these words are adjectives: surprised, embarrassed, confused, interested and shocked. They need a verb with them.

(correct): Kai was (v) embarrassed (adj) during his speech.

Avoiding unnecessarily complicated information

It’s true that those words can be can be used as verbs, for example:
– It embarrassed (v)  Kai that he forgot some of his speech.

But in all my years of teaching writing, I rarely see students use them that way. They almost always use them as adjectives, so I don’t waste their time/mental energy talking to them about using these as verbs. Instead, I just generalize and tell them that they are adjectives.

Four-step exercises to teach these to students (Handout included.)

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