Are Possessive Pronoun and Possessive Adjective Often Mixed Up
Pairs of complementary terms were often confused. Definite article and indefinite article were occasionally reversed, as were comparative adjective and superlative adjective. Possessive pronoun and possessive adjective were often mixed up, especially by the Polish students, and examples of direct speech were given for indirect speech.
Several students from Tag Heuer Carrera Replica Hong Kong seemed to be confused about object, giving one-word examples (nouns, such as ‘chair’ or ‘desk’, or pronouns) which did not identify its grammatical function, that is they understood it in a non-terminological sense A number of incorrect items suggested that students were guessing the answers (which is perhaps to be welcomed because in some cases, such as countable noun, this may lead to success). However, in many cases this was taken too far.It is also possible that students confused this construction with the proper answer because the two had been taught alongside one another. What seems to be happening here is that students are assuming that these terms are transparent in their meaning, in that they can be guessed, and that they are interpreting them in terms of communicative functions (i.e. complimenting, agreeing, comparing). This affected the Polish and Austrian students but not the Hong Kong ones. In fact, overall there were fewer guesses from the latter; this may suggest that they are less adventurous or that their strategies for dealing with unknown words are less developed.
One other interesting finding, this time from correct answers, concerns the systematic use of the same lexical item as example. For instance, among the Austrian students ‘house’ was the example chosen for noun by almost a third, far higher than would be expected if they were operating at random. For the Hong Kong students ‘apple’ was the favorite, whereas for Polish students ‘dog’, ‘cat’, ‘car’ and ‘table’ were the four top choices. This suggests that grammatical categories are being introduced via the use of ‘prototypes’ which may be different for each country. The use of alphabet lists in English-teaching kindergartens in Hong Kong (A is for apple, etc.) may explain the popularity of this word there. In some cases, though, there was agreement on the choice; ‘beautiful’ was the ‘prototypical’ example for adjective throughout. In Poland, 20 students out of 82, in Austria, 21 out of 70 and in Hong Kong, 59 out of 115 (i.e. over half) gave it as the example.
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