JISHOU, HUNAN — After three weeks of reading their diaries and other compositions, I’ve been able to identify some patterns in the written English of my freshmen.
They have not fully understood the need for commas, or have confused commas with periods. As a result, they start many sentences with conjunctions: “and,” “but” and “because” are the most frequent.
Some who have mastered the comma and proper conjunctions use create run-on sentences. To be fair, this habit is one shared by native English-speaking students, so I can’t criticize my ESL students too much.
There are sentence fragments - clauses with no verbs, for example. Sentences that abruptly change topic or subject midstream. There is occasional misuse of tenses, using past for present and present for past, and conjugations, using singular verbs for plural nouns, or vice versa.
One exercise in the freshman comp book is to rewrite incorrect sentences so that they obey all the basic rules of English grammar. These sentences are usually pretty mangled, and a good eye can reconstruct them pretty quickly.
Grading papers can be tedious at times, so I took a break to read the transcript of the debate between Sen. Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin. (Yeah, I know, I’m a geek.) Barely one-fourth of the way through, I came to a not-so-original conclusion.
Palin is either an ESL student herself, or she’s been moonlighting as an ESL textbook contributor.
