Making logical comparisons

If complex sentences containing phrases or clauses are used to make comparisons, care must be taken, particularly in formal English, to ensure that the comparisons are logical and that the appropriate objects are in fact being compared.

For example, the following sentence is logically incorrect, because it compares life in the country to the city.
e.g. Life in the country is different from the city.

In order to be logically correct, the sentence must be changed so that similar types of things are being compared.
e.g. Life in the country is different from life in the city.
This sentence is logically correct, since it compares life in the country to life in the city.
Similarly, the following sentence is logically incorrect, because it compares the vowel sounds of English to Spanish.
e.g. The vowel sounds of English are more numerous than Spanish.
In order to be logically correct, the sentence must be changed so that similar types of things are being compared. Thus, the sentence may be corrected as follows:
e.g. The vowel sounds of English are more numerous than the vowel sounds of Spanish.
See Exercise 14.
In such sentences, the noun or phrase which is repeated in the second part of the comparison may be replaced by that or those. That is used if the noun being replaced is singular, and those is used if the noun being replaced is plural.
e.g. Life in the country is different from that in the city.
The vowel sounds of English are more numerous than those of Spanish.
In the first example, that is used to replace the singular noun life. In the second example, those is used to replace the phrase the vowel sounds. The form those must be used, since the noun sounds is plural.
See Exercise 15.

n grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified.

Adjectives are one of the traditional eight English parts of speech, though linguists today distinguish adjectives from words such as determiners that were formerly considered to be adjectives. In this paragraph, "traditional" is an adjective, and in the preceding paragraph, "main" and "more" are.

Most but not all languages have adjectives. Those that do not typically use words of another part of speech, often verbs, to serve the same semantic function; for example, such a language might have a verb that means "to be big", and would use a construction analogous to "big-being house" to express what English expresses as "big house". Even in languages that do have adjectives, one language's adjective might not be another's; for example, whereas English uses "to be hungry" (hungry being an adjective), Dutch and French use " honger hebben " and " avoir faim," respectively (literally "to have hunger", hunger being a noun), and whereas Hebrew uses the adjective "זקוק" (zaqūq, roughly "in need of"), English uses the verb "to need".

Adjectives form an open class of words in most languages that have them; that is, it is relatively common for new adjectives to be formed via such processes as derivation. However, Bantu languages are well known for having only a small closed class of adjectives, and new adjectives are not easily derived. Similarly, native Japanese adjectives (i -adjectives) are closed class (as are native verbs), though nouns (which are open class) can be used in the genitive and there is the separate class of adjectival nouns (na -adjectives), which is also open, and functions similarly to noun adjuncts in English.

WEEKS 11-12. Topic: Insight into profession. Keeping order in class.

Up-bringing of children in class

Практических занятий – 6час., СРОП- 6час., СРО- 6час.

INSIGHT INTO PROFESSION KEEPING ORDER IN CLASS

Talking Points:

1. What do you think is the best approach to keeping order in class? Do you think this skill is an inherent ability? Or is it acquired through training and practice? Do you think you kept order well during your recent teaching
practice? If so, what is it that helped you to maintain discipline?

2. Do you regard any of your experience as a pupil valuable? If
so, what is it?

3. Have you any exemplar, e.g. a teacher of your school-days who
is a model to you in this respect?

I. a) Read the following text:

Naughty — or Inquisitive?

The inherent naughtiness of children! Heavens above, do teach­ers really believe such rubbish? Evidently so, for the phrase comes from a letter you print and Mr. Tomkins, a head, no less, writing a two-page article, says it is "in the nature of children to be mischie­vous." Do they really think that the child is already naughty or mischievous as it emerges from the womb? I doubt it. What they probably mean is the inherent inquisitiveness of children which pro­vides the fundamental drive to learning. Part of this learning is de­rived from the testing-out of adults with whom the child comes into contact, and unfortunately the pressures of society often make adults impatient or selfish or even, occasionally, sadistic in their respons­es. Inquisitiveness becomes frustrated or distorted into naughtiness (in the eyes of adults, though not necessarily those of the child), The prime function of school should be to nurture, and where necessary, restore inquisitiveness to its fullest vigour; but how can we achieve that with woolly formulations about "naughtiness"?

Actually, I think that such woolliness is often the product of teach­ers' refusal to face up squarely to the basic question relevant to disci­pline in London schools: namely, "to cane or not to cane? " So long as the cane is available, even if only as a last resort, to extract obedience through fear, discussion of alternative policies must remain ham­strung. The learning of complex skills, leadership and the ability to use initiative is not taught through the cane. Caning has ceased even in the Navy's boy training establishments — they found that corporal punishment did not work. Yet some teachers — including correspon­dents to "Contact" — want it restored in London's junior schools. Maybe someone would explain to me why London teachers lag some years behind our military men in this matter, and 190 years behind the Poles, who abolished corporal punishment in schools in 1783.

Charles Gibson

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