AA: I'm Avi Arditti, Rosanne Skirble is away.
With me this week on Wordmaster is our English teacher friend Lida
Baker in Los Angeles, to talk about a few verbs that can cause trouble
for even the best-trained non-native speakers. Listnening online or download MP3
BAKER: "I
got the idea for this segment because for the past six weeks I've been
working with a group of brand-new English teachers from Hong Kong.
Their English is superb, but I noticed here and there that there were
still little errors that persisted, and one of those errors was with the
word 'let.' One of the students got up to do a presentation and she
made a sentence something like, 'and at this point I would let the
students to talk among themselves.' To my native ear, of course, that
'to' shouldn't be there.
"And, you know, there's a very
logical explanation for why a student would make a mistake like this.
Let's take a sentence like 'letting the students to sit down' and think
about what it really means. Well, it means that the teacher allowed --
or will allow -- the students to sit down. With a verb like 'allow,'
it's necessary for us to include the preposition 'to,' but with 'let' it
isn't."
AA: "So it would be like, 'Allow me to introduce myself. Let me sit down.'"
BAKER: "Exactly. Or 'let me introduce myself.' So what students do is
they generalize from one form to another and therefore make the
mistake. There's a few other verbs that act like 'let.' Think of this
sentence: 'My mother made me clean my room.' It wouldn't be correct to
say 'my mother made me to clean my room.' But it's perfectly correct to
say 'my mother forced me to clean my room,' right?"
AA: "Right, exactly."
BAKER: "So with the verb 'make,' it isn't correct to use the
preposition 'to.' Another example is a structure like this: 'I had the
waiter bring me some water.' We use this structure --
I-had-someone-do-something-for-me -- in the sense of somebody that we
hire in some cases to do a service for us. So 'I had the plumber fix
the leak in my sink' or 'I had the dry cleaner remove the stain from my
silk suit.'
"I think the best way to approach this from the
learner's point of view is to think of verbs like 'let' and 'make' and
'have' as exceptions, because the normal pattern would be to include the
preposition 'to.' So once the student is aware of the fact that these
verbs don't act like others, then the student can start kind of paying
attention and looking for them when they listen to the news, when they
listen to the radio, when they watch television.
"Another
really good way to learn these verbs is to look for them in song lyrics.
Think of all the songs that have 'let' in them: 'Let Me Go,' 'You Made
Me Love You.'" (laughter)
MUSIC: "You Made Me Love You"/Judy Garland
BAKER: "So I would tell my students to go to the Internet, because on
the Internet you can find song lyrics, there are thousands of song
lyrics on the Internet, and look for your favorite songs and read the
lyrics. You're going to find lots of examples of sentences with 'let'
and 'make' and 'have.' And if you start humming those songs in your
head, it's really going to help the student to remember how to use these
verbs correctly. Can you think of any others?"
AA: "Uh ... "
BAKER: "'You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,' 'You Make Me Want to Sing,' 'You Make Me Want to Shout.'" (laughter)
MUSIC: "You Make Me Want to Shout"/Otis Day & the Knights
AA: Lida Baker teaches in the American Language Center, part of the
University of California at Los Angeles Extension program. She also
writes textbooks for English learners, available through the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.
And while Lida cannot answer questions personally, send them to us at
VOA Wordmaster, Washington DC 20237 USA. Our e-mail address is
word@voanews.com, and our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster.
I'm Avi Arditti.
MUSIC: "Shout"
(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)
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