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New Cartoon: A Misunderstanding of the Passive

2/28/2017

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Here is an old cartoon (for me) but a new cartoon for you. I was teaching the passive voice a while back, and I had to make this point via the white board in response to a very frustrated grammar student asking, "Why can't I say, 'The soup is tasting John'?":
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That's why you can't say "the soup is tasting John"! Okay, so it really looks like the soup is eating John (maybe he's a really aggressive taster?), but the point is these two sentences are not equivalent although they may seem like it to students who haven't learned how to use passive voice yet.

Students are also resistant to using it at first and will mark it wrong on a test because they learn that stative verbs cannot take a progressive form. For example, we cannot say "He is being a lawyer now" or "I am seeing a bird out the window now." This sentence ("The soup is being tasted by John") is the passive form of "John is tasting the soup." It is not the copula "is" in the progressive form.

Anyway, have a good one, and don't let any soup taste you!

-Bill
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New Video: How Many Vowels Does English Have?

2/23/2017

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I posted a new video to my YouTube channel. Here it is:
I have been wanting to make this video for such a long time, but I've also been making a bunch of excuses. Finally, I couldn't take it any longer and had to record it (now that I bought Camtasia, I have a lot of motivation to get off my butt and record things).

Quick synopsis/spoiler: There are not only 5 vowels in English. There are 15 vowels. Whenever I say this, I typically get this reaction (pictured at right):

"THERE ARE FIVE VOWELS, A, E, I, O, U. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5! OH, AND Y, SOMETIMES Y. THAT'S SIX. KIND OF."
Picture
Picture
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Well, we may have 5 letters, I say, but they are often inadequate to capture all the different sounds. Look at these 3 English words:
  • flood
  • foot
  • food
All of them have the same letters in the middle, but they are all clearly different, right? That leads to this reaction (pictured left).
They finally give up the fight, hang their head in academic shame, and proclaim me the winner...


Actually, it's more like this:
Picture
Picture
Anyway, there are still 15 actual sounds in Midwestern American English, so there! (runs away quickly)

-Bill
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    Hi! I'm Bill.

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    I'm all about making English more accessible to English language learners and their teachers. Click here to learn more about me and my site.
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