Talk:English as an Additional Language

About

 * Title: English as an Additional Language
 * Started: 6 January 2005
 * Size: 5,300 words (Mar 2009)

Question
I dont understand how this would be useful to someone unless they already spoke english...wouldnt it make more since to use almost an elementary approach with pictures and foreign language captions and continue from there? I think there are more effective ways to do this. But so far what you have done would be very appropriate at an advanced level.

Proposed outline
This is a new proposed outline for this book, with the goal being to write an EAL textbook that can be translated into other languages to add to the material there. As the book progresses, more and more vocabulary will be introduced. Feel free to comment on or change it. This is a very rough and incomplete draft, so bear with me here:


 * Introduction
 * Purpose of this Book
 * Why to learn English
 * Chapter 0: Crash course
 * The English alphabet
 * Pronunciation (British, American...)
 * General rules of spelling and capitalization
 * Inline pronunciation guide system (more on this later)
 * Chapter 1: First sentences
 * Introducing nouns (singular only)
 * Introducing articles: the, a, an
 * Introducing verbs: present progressive tense
 * Copular verb is
 * Practice text
 * Chapter 2
 * Plural forms of nouns, some irregular forms
 * Personal pronouns
 * Copular verbs are, am
 * Practice text
 * Chapter 3
 * Simple past tense (-ed), some irregular forms
 * Copular verbs was, were
 * Introducing prepositions: to, in, of, etc.
 * Possessives with -'s, -s'
 * Practice text
 * Chapter 4
 * Simple present tense
 * Infinitives: to+verb
 * Uses of the infinitive: want to, have to
 * Relative clauses with who, which, that, etc.
 * Practice text

And more. --Krestom 21:13, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Cats
I don't have the expertise, but I'm curious... so I'm helping where I can, with linking and organising. Good to see some activity (Hi Krestom).

The categorization is mixed up... See Category talk:English language for discussion on this. Apparently "The standard convention is to name a book's category after its title." --Singkong2005 09:56, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

A book for teaching English?
We'll need to make sure that information on teaching is kept separate (though interlinked where appropriate) from the textbook for students.

I'd suggest that a book be started for this material - perhaps English as an Additional Language. Even if nothing much is done at first, at least it will keep the material separate. --Singkong2005 11:36, 4 August 2006 (UTC)


 * We could divide this book into two parts, one for teaching and one for learning. That way, the teacher's book can be better integrated with the textbook; in other words, the teacher would use the teacher's book to teach from the learner's book.
 * On another note, it would be a shame to delete the text currently in the book, but on the other hand an EAL student does not need to be taught how to use money. I think we could salvage some of the text to use for translation excersises, or to explain things how to reckon time in English.
 * On yet another note, the "inline pronunciation key" mentioned in the outline is a system of diacritics used to show the reader how to pronounce the words. There are still some regional pronunciation differences and character encoding problems that need to be sorted out, but here is a sample:
 * Ţhē ĭ nlīnė pron ŭ nçï ā tįon kēy mĕntįonėd ĭn ţhē ŏŭ tlīnė ĭş a sŷstem of d ī ∙acr ĭ tĭcs.
 * Some letters might not show up correctly. --Krestom 19:57, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

New Changes?
Is this book no longer being updated? I'm going to try and sort it out a little. I'm creating links to each lesson as suggested at the top of this page. I'm going to copy over some of the info from this first page into the new pages. If this book is for those learning English as a second language shouldn't we try to keep the language a bit simpler especially on the introduction pages? Xania 00:47, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Orphaned pages
The following pages are not linked to by this book or any other and should be marked with if they are no longer useful for the book, linked to, or merged and marked with. -- Adrignola talk contribs 15:44, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
 * English as an Additional Language/Introducing verbs
 * English as an Additional Language/Relative clauses
 * English as an Additional Language/Why learn English