218 Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It
Unfortunately, prepositions don’t translate very well into other languages.
Some have fewer; some have ‘postpositions’ that go after the noun and some
just use different expressions entirely. Be prepared for a lot of groans from
students whenever they have to get the right preposition because in many
cases they simply have to learn the whole phrase by heart.
When an expression needs a particular preposition in a sentence, you should
highlight that to students. For example:
to marry: to be married to someone.
to agree: to agree with someone or something.
Introducing Articles
Articles appear before nouns in a sentence. Fortunately for students there are
only a three:
✓ A: The indefinite article.
✓ An: The indefinite article before a vowel sound only.
✓ The: The definite article.
You can’t teach the students that ‘an’ comes before a vowel. You need to say a
vowel sound or phoneme because they to need to rely on pronunciation, not
spelling. For example:
a fire
an aeroplane
But:
a university /junivsitii/
an honest man /ɒnist/
Although there are only three articles, quite a number of rules surround
them.
Teach the rules for articles whenever you teach the vocabulary associated
with them. It’s really difficult for students to remember lists of rules but they
get a feel for what sounds right if they learn whole phrases. For example, you
teach ‘to have dinner’ instead of just ‘dinner’, and if the students tend to make
errors by inserting an article, you can write it this way on the board: ‘to have a
dinner’ and cross out the ‘a’.
