Ron's ESL Blogs

One of the most common mistakes we see in ESL students’ writing concerns doubling the last letter of a verb when we add “-ing” or “-ed” to it. ESL students do not know when to double it and when not to. In students’ essays, I often see spelling mistakes like this: “planing” for “plan,” “rainning” for ”rain,” “writting” for “write,”  ”enjoyying” for “enjoy,” “studing” for “study,” “prefering” for “prefer,” and “offerring” for “offer.” These mistakes show that the students have not fully understood the grammatical rules used here.

Actually, the rule is not simple. We often give our students an incomplete rule. Here are a few things we need to do. First we should help students understand SYLLABLES. They need to be able to make a distinction between one-syllable verbs and two-syllable verbs. If a one-syllable verb ends with a single vowel letter + a single consonant letter, then we need to double the consonant letter before adding “-ing”. For example, “hitting”, but “eating”. We do not double “t” in “eating” because there are two vowel letters. For two-syllable verbs, what makes the difference is the stress. If the stress is on the first syllable, we’ll never double the last consonant letter; if the stress is on the second syllable, then we need to follow the rules to double or not to double the last consonant letter. That is why it is “referring”, but “offering”.  -Ron Lee

If you ask ESL students which is correct — “an university” or “a university”, many students will say “an university” is correct because “u” is a vowel. This kind of mistake occurs because we did not make the rules clear to our students, who know that there are five vowel letters “a, e, i, o, u.” They believe that if a noun starts with a vowel letter, we should use “an.” Actually the rule is that if a word starts with a vowel sound, we have to use “an.” That is why we say “an SUV,” even though “S” is a consonant letter. “U” is pronounced in two ways. “a uniform,” but “an uncle,” We say “a hotel,” but “an hour” because in “hour” h is not voiced.

The article “the” is the most frequently used word in English (“a/an” is the fifth).  Therefore, we often assume that it should not be a problem to our students. Actually, articles are very difficult to learn for ESL students because in their own languages, they might not have “articles”.

For the definite article “the”,  ESL students want to be told when “the” is used and when “the” is not to be used. Here a list I gave my students.

Where ”the” needs to be used:

1. To refer to something that has already been mentioned;

e.g. There is a watch on the table. The watch belongs to our teacher.

2. When both the speaker and listener know what is being talked about;

e.g.  Remember to turn off the TV;

3. Something that is unique;

e.g. the sun, the moon.

4. Directions;

e.g. in the east, in the south

5. Before superlatives;

e.g. the busiest day

6. Before ordinal numbers;

e.g. the first, the second, for the first time

7. With adjectives to mean a group of people;

e.g. the rich, the old

8. With names of oceans, rivers, and mountains;

e.g. the Atlantic Ocean, the Red Sea, the Amazon

9. With names of countries;

e.g. the United States, the People’s Republic of China (What we need to explain here is that “the” is used when the name of the country is composed of general English words. If the name is a proper noun which only means that country, we cannot put “the” before it. e.g. Brazil. We cannot say the Brazil.)

Readers are welcome to add more to the list.

-Ron Lee

When we talk about writing, we often talk about the writing at discourse level. We talk about the organization of an essay, how to write an introduction and a conclusion, a thesis statement, coherence, and so on. This is definitely correct and it is what we should do when we teach writing, especially at high school and college levels. However, when it comes to ESL writing, we may have to deal with it differently. The writing problems of ESL students are different from the writing problems of students of native speakers. ESL students’ writing problems are mostly at sentence and word levels. They have problems with spelling, grammar, and word usage.

One big difference between ESL students and students of native speakers is that native students can speak English and ESL students cannot. When you can speak English correctly, generally you can write English correctly. The problem may be only how to organize sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into an essay.  ESL students may have learned writing skills in their native language.  They have ideas and know how to structure an essay, but their problems are grammatical errors. They don’t know how to write a sentence correctly.

For ESL students, we don’t need to worry about their writing skills at discourse level because they can be transferred from their native language.  What they need help with is at sentence level. They need to learn how to write a sentence correctly. They should be allowed to make mistakes and learn from mistakes. They need to understand what sentence is wrong, and possibly why it is wrong. Once they learn how to write sentences correctly, they don’t need to be taught how to organize an essay because that knowledge can be transferred from their native language.    -Ron Lee