Page 97 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing
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 SENTENCES, PHRASES, AND TEXT CONSTRUCTION 83
COMMON ERRORS: MISSING OR TOO MANY REQUIRED SENTENCE SLOTS
One of the most common errors in L2 sentences is the missing main verb or its elements. Other types of sentence-level errors frequently found in stu- dent writing can be more than one subject noun (phrase; e.g., Freud, he...), prepositional phrases used in place of the subject, missing objects of transi- tive verbs, and missing subject or object complements. Although some of these errors cannot be completely avoided, students can be taught to edit many of them by identifying the filled or unfilled required sentence slots.
In practically all cases, for a sentence to be grammatical, it must in- clude a subject noun phrase, verb, and, most often, direct object. The fol- lowing examples from student academic essays demonstrate that teaching students to identify the required sentence slots can lead to cor- rection of many sentence- and phrase-level errors. The following exam- ples of various L2 errors can be corrected relatively easily when sentences are parsed into slots.
Counting Sentence Parts
Checking sentences for grammaticality entails locating all required sen- tence elements and making sure that they occupy their correct slots.
Step 1.
Step 2.
Step 3.
Step 4.
Step 5.
The following example illustrates this:
Subject Verb
The Original Sentence
Object/ Prep. Comma + Subject Comple- Phrase Conjunct
ment or;
Verb
are. [verb without
a subject]
Object/ Complement
easy to notice
There
are
differences
am, . . similarities
between the two major the- ories
Find all verb phrases and go to the left to locate their subject noun phrases.
Block off all the prepositional phrases that sit between the subject noun phrase and the verb.
Go to the right of the verb phrase and locate the direct object, the subject complement, or the object complement.
Find the required slots and check to see whether they are empty or overfilled.
Fill the required slots, if they are empty, or delete overfillers.
1. There are differences and similarities between the two theories are easy to notice.
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