Page 189 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

TEACHING VERB TENSES AND VOICE 175
2. In the following excerpt from a student assignment, please iden- tify the tense-related (and other types of) errors, and state how these er- rors can be clearly explained to students so that they can the correct them independently without having to rely on the teacher's corrections.
Around the world, there are numbers of people with diseases that were inher- ited from their ancestors. Every day, approximately 14% of newborn infants were afflicted by some sort of inherited physical or mental problems when they were born. The diseases dealing with genes are very hard to know who will in- herit it. Gene therapy is a medical procedure that treats a disease by replacing a
faulty gene. Though many people thought that gene therapy has some side ef- fects, I believe that gene therapy will be important to us for our future. Nowa-
days, scientists are trying to solve the problem of AIDS. Gene therapy researchers are trying to find a cure for the disease that many infants inherited
from their mothers when they were born. There are many developments that were occurred in gene therapy recently that will bring the world around.
(Extracted from a student assignment on the influence of technol- ogy on health care.)
3. As discussed earlier in the chapter, the progressive and perfect tenses are rare in academic writing, and, for example, the perfect pro- gressive is hardly ever encountered. In your opinion, why is the teach- ing of these tenses so common in L2 grammar instruction? Can similar observations also be true about other English constructions?
4. When it comes to tenses and the active and the passive voices, do you think that the findings of corpus analyses of academic writing in English can be applied to L2 student writing? Why or why not? If the findings of corpus analyses cannot be useful in L2 classroom, what should the basis of ESL and EAP curricula be?
5. The information in this chapter explains that many passive con- structions in English are idiomatic and have to be learned. Can you come up with a few examples of passive constructions that you believe to be idiomatic or derived and explain your determination? A fewex- amples are provided.
(a) The importance of small business to the U.S. economy cannot be overstated.
(b) The speaker was long winded, and the listeners were quickly lost in his citations of numbers.
(c) Once the production plans are made for the next business cycle, they are continually altered in response to the new information.
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT VERB TENSES AND VOICE AND TEACHING
Carlson, G., & Tanenhaus, M. (1984). Lexical meanings, structural meanings, and concepts. In D. Testen, V.Mishra, & J. Drogo (Eds.), Papers from the Parasession on Lexical Semantics (pp. 39-52). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, consciousness, and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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