Beli Tsar wrote:Cavesa wrote:Random Review wrote:aaleks wrote:For me as an English-learner having no articles in her native tongue the sentence "The book is red" is a bad sentence/teaching example. If it's "This is a book. The book is red" it's okay but just "The book is red" is doing me a huge disservice because it inadvertently teaches me that the article is not important. The article in this sentence standing alone looks more like an accessory to me rather than a meaningful part of the sentence.
Totally agree. It needs a context at the very least.
Of course the sentence needs context and I highly doubt it was taught without the context and the grammatical explanation.
Leaving aside the methodological/theoretical for a moment, let's not underestimate just how language teaching can be.
I was taught in this way in high school French, and there was very little context and no grammatical explanation for the first 3-4 years. The sentences really were this inane. The main capacities I gained were the ability to describe the contents of my pencil case, and to enumerate my hobbies. Presumably this was supposed to be interesting and relevant compared to grammatical instruction.
I have no doubt that theory behind the teaching methodology could have worked if put into practice differently. But it wasn't...
That is the problem. Sticking to this for 3-4 years.
Approximately two eternities ago, I started learning French from the classical sentences too. But it worked well, because we were progressing from that stuff quite fast.
That is the problem. Teachers, who spend six months on the first unit of a coursebook, and there are many of those. Or three years without really giving people any explanations.
Not even the stupidest sentence on the planet is a huge problem, if it is one of many you spend time on. But any small set of sentences is likely to be considered stupid by a part of the public exposed to it.
Random Review wrote:CompImp wrote:I genuinely can't believe you lot have spent 6 pages arguing over 'the book is red'.
Get a REDACTED life !
I teach English for a living (or at least I do when I'm not waiting for a visa... again!) and languages are my biggest hobby (interested in both learning them and in how they work in general). This
is my life.
On a serious note, there's a lot of really good stuff in this thread (and the Krashen one).
I have a life and right now, I don't like it much. The book is red is an awesome distraction from it. Yeah, I shouldn't procrastinate, I know. For further lecturing me on it, please stand at the end of the loooong line.
Btw welcome to the forum. It has a wonderful feature: you can get out of a thread without finishing it, whenever you feel like it
We all use it, I recommend trying it out. Otherwise, you are likely to read a lot of stuff you may not be that interested in but other people are.
And it was on a different subject initially, not one stupid sentence. Plus there have been good posts added in, as Random Review mentions.