Well now, we don't have a Linguistics or even an Anthropology subforum, so I'll just put this here.
I teach a high school English class (two, actually, this year--10th and 11th grade). These aren't TEFL-type classes--although I think maybe they should be--but rather courses based on the standardized English curriculum used in US public high schools. (Justified, ostensibly, by this being an English-immersion school which starts at the kindergarten level and the idea that students are supposed to be effectively bilingual by the time they get to the high school levels, although is only dubiously true in many cases.)
Anyway, so I'm using this American high-school English textbook and have found that what my 10th grade students generally need before we can really do anything else (it's nominally a class on writing composition for the most part) is a total brass-tacks shakedown of English sentence structure and the components thereof. (They don't seem to have really picked this up in prior grades, although it's nominally part of the curriculum for those grades, for reasons I have a lot to say about but won't go into here.)
I should also add that I'm not actually trained or certified to teach high school English, and have reached a point of strongly disagreeing with and even resenting the decision to give me this assignment. I'm at times out of my depth--I know the content, more or less, but I struggle to determine whether there are more effective teaching methods for it than the ones I'm using.
Nonetheless, here I am, and I'm in the thick of trying to get 22 of them up to speed on topics like identifying "Parts of Speech" and the structure and function of phrases and clauses.
Well, a problem I keep running up against is that the textbook I'm assigned to use for this is rather frequently presenting me with ideas that seem wrong to me. (Me with, again, a decent command of my native language and the concept of grammar but no formal training as a teacher of those things.) I'm regularly teaching, thinking I can just go from what I learned when I took these classes in high school, but then running into the fact that what I'm telling my students conflicts with what the textbook I'm telling them to read (and assigning them work from) says.
I have no great confidence in high school textbooks as an overall genre of publication. From what I've read, it's quite shocking how little involvement any competent people have in the process of writing them.
However, I'm very cognizant of the fact that these could just be errors on my part, so I'm submitting these questions to you, the board, and especially the amateur/professional grammarians among you, because I know you exist.
I've had two major hiccups along these lines to date:
Number 1 is perhaps a trivial matter of vocabulary, but did cause a lot of confusion because I hadn't quite realized that the problem existed yet:
I was under the impression that there are three possible "noun numbers" (or number-states of nouns) available in English. You either have one of a discrete item you can count, you have more than one of a discrete item you can count, or you have a perhaps measurable but non-countable quantity of something which doesn't exist in the form of discrete units. (Like "love", "water", or "cheese", although these words do also exist in countable forms with different meanings.)
As I distinctly recall, the term for a noun describing exactly one discrete unit of a countable item is "singular", the term for a noun describing two or more discrete units of a countable item is "plural", and the term for a noun describing a non-countable substance is "collective."
Well, not so, says my textbook. Going by this riveting piece of literature, there are only two possible number-states for English nouns (any noun must either be singular or plural), and furthermore the word "collective" refers not to a noun with this non-existent third number-state but rather to a noun describing a discrete entity that comprises multiple other discrete entities--such as "team" or "collection."
The general point being that a noun might be grammatically singular even if it describes a group of multiple entities, which is of course correct, nonetheless I can't help but find this nonsensical. There are clearly nouns that you don't use articles on, indicating that they are neither plural nor singular but exhibit a third type of number-state. I've started simply calling these "uncountable" nouns to spare confusion, but this irritates me. Am I wrong?
Number 2 is perhaps more practically significant, and thus more vexing.
The textbook keeps insisting that participles are inherently adjectives and must therefore only modify nouns. If you ask me, it's rather obvious that participles can also act as adverbs, particularly when they clearly pertain to verbs more so than to nouns.
For example, in the sentence "We went camping," to my mind 'camping' is rather obviously an adverb modifying 'went'. The textbook insists that 'camping' would instead be an adjective modifying 'we', but I cannot for the life of me come up with a rationale for this that makes any sense. (You went where? You went to do what?)
It's come up in exercises which are formatted so as to render what I would consider a correct answer categorically impossible. (As in, "identify the underlined word as either a verb or an adjective, and if an adjective, name the noun it modifies.")
Is this just some nuance I never picked up on in my own education on the subject, has some decision been made by academic authorities since I was in school, or are the people writing this textbook simply less than fully familiar with they are trying to explain, more so than I am?
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