Today I helped S-sensei with her low-level, generally unmotivated 3rd year students. They were doing some pretty easy sentence translation exercises. They can see the sentence in Japanese, and then the English words in the wrong order, with Subject, Verb, and Object were clearly identified. It’s like this:
日本語。。。
repairs (O), urgently, car (S), my, needs (V)日本語。。。。
wine(O), inexpensive, produces (V), good, Chile (S)日本語。。。。
to, our, a, school, kids (S), bus (O), take (V)
Even though I can’t read (or write!!) the Japanese version), I can almost instantly figure the sentence. If you are able to read this blog then of course you can solve them, too. On the other hand, the students find it difficult and have their own way of figuring it out.
When they translate the 10 sentences on the worksheet, they generally work left-to-right, top-to-bottom. This is great unless they get stuck on a sentence, in which case they usually just sit and stare at it. I suggested that for some of them they might try solving the translation in a different way.
Write the “skeleton” or the main parts of the sentence first, and then fill in the blanks. It’s always S-V-O right? And you know which words are the S, V, and O, right? So just write those parts with blank spaces between them. For example:
__ car ________ needs ________ repairs _____
__ Chile ________ produces ________ wine _____
___ kids ________ take ______ bus __________
Then cross off the words you’ve already used, and fill in the blanks.
Adjectives (my car) are usually easy to place. Articles (a bus) aren’t so bad if you have them in a word list. Adverbs (urgently needs) are a little harder to place. Prepositional phrases usually go at the end of the sentence (to school).
Some benefits of this approach might be:
- It’s better than nothing for students who would otherwise give up early.
- Looking at the problem in a different way should help a student who has hit a wall midway through a sentence.
- Seeing the skeleton of a sentence might give a larger insight into how English works. It’s a wider perspective, compared to the tunnel-vision of translating word-by-word.
(PS, I haven’t updated this journal lately because my workload is very light this year. I’m not planning very much at all. My brain is inactive and soft and ineffective.)