Eugene, United States TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

Unit #18 provided a great review of modals, phrasal verbs, and passive and active voice. I felt the grammatical distinctions between modals was well stated and easy to digest. However, I wish more of the chapter was dedicated to phrasal verbs, as they can be quite complicated to explain; even to those who grew up speaking English. As a native English speaker, I understand the use of transitive verbs, but the way the chapter conveyed them seemed too rushed. There should be more discussion about direct and indirect objects and how they affect the parts of speech in a sentence. Perhaps more like the examples provided for relative clauses. Those examples conveyed the subject's relationship to the verb and the object experiencing an action. In any case, the section on passive and active voice was relatively straightforward and presented itself in a way that could be easily conveyed to students in the future. For a long time, I struggled with passive and active voice, but I'm much better with it now, and the chapter helped further clarify their nuances. In general, I surmise many of the topics discussed will be reserved to upper-level students because the contents of a given lecture could be quite confusing for even intermediate-level speakers. The most valuable thing I learned and took note of is to track my use of modals and phrasal verbs and use them in everyday conversation with students to help foster a natural and independent use of the language points.