Having just finished a module for a repeat class, this was a daily issue. And now, I’m just about to start our summer module, which also happens to correspond with Ramadan. The students during this module will be…shall we say, less motivated than usual.
The quickest way to lose friends and make your coworkers loathe you is by correcting someone’s grammar. But what is the frustrated pedant to do when she hears “I had less candy than my brother, but my dad still took some of mine.” and she knows, knows, that a terrible grammatical sin has been committed?
The answer is, of course, to secretly judge them and let a happy little smile be the only outward signal of your intellectual, and frankly, moral superiority show.
The matter at hand is less versus fewer. As the rule says, fewer is for countable nouns and less is for uncountable ones, generally speaking. But, just because a noun can be plural, do not automatically assume that it should take the determiner fewer. Consider this passage from the New York Times:
Also use less with a number that describes a quantity considered as a single bulk amount: The police recovered less than $1,500; It happened less than five years ago; The recipe calls for less than two cups of sugar.
Also consider that certain phrases are idiomatic and therefore, acceptable. One such example would be “Write an paragraph is 200 words or less.” Linguist and author Stephen Pinker suggests that the less-fewer rule is applied by many pedants a little too forcefully. It’s acceptable to use less, he says, “with a singular count noun, as in ‘one less car’ and ‘one less thing to worry about’.” The ‘rule’ about less-fewer is one he considers “dubious” though a fair guide in terms of style.
Everyone loves the Disney/Pixar movie Ratatouille, right? Who wouldn’t want to follow the adventures of a precocious rat running around a Michelin star restaurant?
Inspired by an exercise on the always-useful Movie Segments to Assess Grammar Goals blog, I made these pages for my Intermediate level classes to accompany a short clip from the popular film. The objective is to get the students more comfortable with passive voice. In this lesson, I assume the students have already been introduced to the grammar structure. A typical ~45 minute lesson plan exploiting this worksheet would go something like this:
Warm-up: small group/partner discussion – Do you like to cook? What can you cook by yourself? etc Or questions about dining out, like “What’s the fanciest restaurant you’ve been to?” or the like. “What would you do if you saw a mouse or rat in a restaurant?”
Then ask if they’ve seen Ratatouille. You can show the poster of the movie or a still from it to jog their memory. See if they can summarize the film or give a rough outline of its plot.
Have the students recount what happened in the clip. Make sure they know who the three characters are (Remy, Colete, and Linguini). Some concept check questions will help make sure they can do the rest of the exercises.
Then, you can have them do either exercise B or C, depending on whether they’ve had an introduction to passive voice already or not. If not, starting with part C might be better, with some instruction on how to form the passive voice first. If they have, then B can be enough, with C as some extra practice for reinforcement.
A wrap-up discussion can be done next, with similar questions from the warm-up, but guide them to use passive voice. You can give them a topic like “Describe the last time you ate out.” and model an example with passive voice. “My friends and I went to Tony’s Italian. Spaghetti was served. The dish was prepared without cheese. … ” Concept check questions using passive voice can be used to steer them in the right direction.
There you have it. Let me know if you use this, and tell me how it goes!
Download the worksheet and answer key:
This article lays out the case against Chomsky’s universal grammar theories. Essentially, despite decades of refining the theory, it has never been able to accommodate all languages. More damningly, it doesn’t correspond to research about how children learn their native language.
The alternatives that are coming up, it seems, view language a bit like the way neuro-scientists are starting to think about consciousness, as an emergent property of the brain. The authors are careful to denote that there is no comprehensive, widely-accepted usage theory to replace universal grammar. But, as more and more corpora become available and more brain science is done, it is very likely that a better model will emerge.