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Vol.2 , No. 3, Publication Date: Nov. 21, 2019, Page: 127-132
| [1] | Dennis Michael Bryant, Faculty of Arts, University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia. |
Focussing on the ESL student perspective, this paper develops a systematic and holistic, yet nevertheless clear, explication of managing sophistication in the Verbal slot. The inference is that such clarity is missing in extant grammatical treatises on ESL Verbal slot construction. Holistic is defined as a presentation not merely of the structures, but rather one which attempts to communicate the ethos of English, thereby allowing adult ESL students to more readily find answers to the anomalies which an incomplete understanding brings to those learners of English. The proposition is that a full appreciation of the Verbal slot is best achieved in two stages. The first stage is to inform students on the variety of patterns that will be encountered in a Verbal slot. This is done by using exemplar patterns, but restricted to a single sentence type – the declarative type. These declaratives display rising degrees of Verbal slot sophistication with the objective of raising ESL student familiarisation and comfort with manipulating Verbal slots. The second stage to fluency, which is detailed elsewhere, requires students to employ their Verbal slot familiarity in order to transform declaratives to the range of other utterance types, such as passive voice, subjunctive mood, interrogative, conditional, emphatic agreement, emphatic negation, and statives as well as imperative. Sentence transformations, it needs be said, present ESL speakers with a new set of difficulties largely because the transformation process moves beyond the Verbal slot to include the Subject slot, and although less frequently but more radically, transformation can include the Object slot.
Keywords
ESL Educational Practice, ESL Curriculum Redevelopment, ESL Teaching, Second Language Acquisition
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