Lack of emphasis on NPs in ESL

Much linguistic analysis is neither intended for nor useful as a language teaching aid. It all depends on what language you know and what language you are learning.

Leaving aside pronouns, in English you do not need to change the ending of a noun according to whether it is the subject or object of a sentence. The same applies to French. So, when you teach French to English speakers, or English to French speakers, there is no need to go into long explanations about "subject and objects". When you teach Russian on the other hand you are not going to get very far without the pupils having a conscious understanding (they will of course already have an unconscious understanding) of "subjects and objects".

With possession however it is different. In English we have the possessive "s". So a French speaker needs to think a bit about the idea of possession when he learns English. However, this is not necessary if he is learning Spanish; he just needs to know the Spanish for "of". When the pupil advances he will find forms such as "house furnishings" and when he does he can consider whether "house" is an s-less genitive or a noun used attributively, but even then, I am not sure it is particularly helpful. What is important is that the pupil gets to know that in English nouns can be used in ways that they cannot be or are rarely used in French; they can be "piled up" as in North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which in French has to be "The Treaty of the Atlantic of the North". Whether an analysis shows that in such a case North, Atlantic and Treaty may not in fact be nouns does not really help.

I obviously agree with Forbes: it depends on your first language. I have never had any problems with passive sentences, subjects and objects, the difference between countable and uncountable, etc. because those are all features I have in Italian too. It is not difficult at all for me to use conditional structures (= modal verbs) in polite requests, like in "Could you lend me 1,000 dollars?", because very similar structures are used the same way in Italian too. On the other hand, I know some Asian languages don't even have past or future tenses, so it's easy to imagine how much more difficult it must be for them to learn English.

So instead of focusing on noun phrases, shouldn't we rather focus on the real difficulties, which happen to vary from learner to learner according to their native language and past experience with languages in general?

Anonymous

How about this student?

<<I assume many of you have watched the cartoon "Totally spies", right?
I just wonder why it is "Totally" here. "totally" is always an adverb, so what do they imply when using "totally" here? How can it go with the noun "spies"?>>>

Heh, good question! I don't know! Could somebody tell me more about that, as a side note here without going completely off topic? Otherwise I will open another thread. I would say "Total spies", but if I suspect that "totally" in "Totally spies" is used informally in some dialects to mean "definitely", like in, like " Are you, like, coming to my awesome party tonight? - Oh, yeah, totally!"
If that is the case, then I don't think that "totally" has anything to do with proving learners have trouble with noun phrases. It would suggest learners have trouble with informal English, and if you ask me, that's true.

>>It is not difficult at all for me to use conditional structures (= modal verbs) in polite requests, like in "Could you lend me 1,000 dollars?", because very similar structures are used the same way in Italian too. <<

And do they omit articles in Italian?

 "Could you lend me a 1,000 dollars?",

Anonymous

So, Mr Pedantic, would you say that Koyeen is an example of your "an ESL student who could understand the English necessary for such an explanation would no longer need it."?

I think Kooyeen (note the spelling) has moved beyond the need for noun-phrase explanations, Anon; though no doubt recreational use is still an option for all of us.

MrP