Some white lies about grammar

With some spare time on my hands, I’m going through a brand-new edition of the pre-intermediate coursebook we are going to pilot next year. Also, I’m checking this edition against the previous one to see if some useful adjustments have been made. I’m especially curious about the grammar sections. What I secretly hope for is a less prescriptive view on some of the grammar points.

The thing is that particularly at the pre-intermediate level, some areas of grammar are presented in a somewhat questionable way. I guess the reason why it is so is that coursebook writers simply don’t want to confuse our B1 students by presenting too many exceptions to the rules. And we teachers are expected to confirm their white lies.

However, some of our students turn out to be cleverer than we originally thought. Moreover, they immerse themselves in English every day. As a result, some very hard-to-shake-off questions may fly around in the classroom from time to time.

Here are some examples I have in mind:

• Contrast: present simple and present continuous

White lie 1: We don’t use the present continuous with certain verbs. They include: hate, love, like, need, prefer, want, wish …

Students’ reaction to this is immediate: “And what about ‘I’m loving it.’ – a slogan you can hear in the famous advertisement for McDonald’s?”

I really like this explanation I came across on the internet:

The sentence is as grammatical as McDonald’s foodstuffs are palatable – in other words, not at all. But then many advertising slogans are ungrammatical since this can make them more memorable.

Still, the seed of doubt has already been planted into your students’ little heads …

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• Contrast: past simple and past continuous (a nightmare I discussed in detail here on my blog).

And this FB post inspired the aforementioned blog post.

White lie 2: We use the past continuous to describe a scene in the past. 

This is something my students don’t usually struggle with. They accept the truth and they are happy it usually works.

But then … BANG! Check out the opening sentences of two short stories by Ernest Hemingway:

1. It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.
2. An old man with steel-rimmed spectacles and very dusty clothes sat by the side of the road.

I can only hope my students will never bump into The First Forty-Nine Stories collection because then I’d have to justify some lies. I’d have to explain that there are exceptions to rules or that this is simply the way language is used. But I tell you what; even I am confused!

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• Must and have to

White lie 3: *Must* often expresses the feeling and wishes of the speaker. *Have to* often expresses external obligation. 

Really? If you want your students to believe this unconditionally, tell them to avoid all public places such as constructions sites, airports, swimming pools, banks, etc.

Remember: PUBLIC PLACES have to be BE AVOIDED! 

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• Comparative adjectives

White lie 4: If a two-syllable adjective ends in a consonant plus -y, we drop the – y and add -ier, as in friendly > friendlier.

Really? Well, I strongly recommend that you keep your students away from any corpora.

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White lie 5: Corpora could also be lethally dangerous if you wanted to make your students believe some lies about quantifiers, such the one that fewer is used with countable nouns whereas less is used with uncountable nouns, which is one of the truths presented in many pre-intermediate coursebooks. But is it really that simple?

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Some other nightmares white lies are, for example, the rules about reported speech, which I write about here, or the past perfect, which I discussed with my PLN on Facebook back in November 2016:

Well, I must say I’m a bit disappointed; as far as the authenticity of language is concerned, no significant adjustments have been made in the latest edition of the aforementioned coursebook, apart from those regarding the design of grammar charts and boxes. So, next year, again, I’ll have to repeat the same lies and hope that my students won’t see through them.

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