Clearly, my frustrations with tutoring are the theme of the week.
I've been thinking about my difficulties predicting where French speakers will have problems in English. I have a great grammar workbook in French which targets the problems of English speakers, but I have yet to find a similar book for French speakers of English.
This page is helpful:
http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/french.htm
But not a final answer.
My amazon.com searches just make me wish I'd bought one of those guides "How to teach English as a foreign languge" a year and a half ago. Kind of late to invest in one now, and I really don't think the library has anything like that.
2 comments:
I wish I had some great resource, but I have a good linguistics background and mostly just learned to pay really close attention to the problems my boyfriend has, since he's still at a fairly beginning level. The majority of his problems are misusing vocabulary and adverb placement. He was using the BLED I got him for English which helped shape up his grammar but the vocab is weird, even for British English. With my private students we were using a business focused book (not a help with the high schoolers unfortunately), and I had extra grammar books since that's what I like to focus on. I think just after a while you see the same problems with everyone, so you know what to prepare for. You have probably seen it all at this point, maybe you could take notes and write the book yourself!
And I have that grammar book you suggested and I love it, I agree there needs to be something similar for English learners.
I used this site for phonetics and helping my students with correct vowel pronunciation (even if it is British English...): http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/l1french.html
Larousse has a tiny book called Anti-Fautes d'Anglais that might help to give you ideas, but it's mostly list form and there are no exercises. There's a large list of phrasal verbs at least.
I'm also looking for materials that focus on the most common mistakes for French speakers who are learning English. I have a few translation exercises here: http://www.ielanguages.com/lessonplan.html but I'm still searching for websites or books...
But yeah, I mostly listen to David and my private student's mistakes and try to keep track of them.
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