[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 13 | July 25, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]
Ken Paterson says, “This, these, that and those
Over the years, I’ve had a complex relationship with the demonstrative determiners.
Before I started teaching English, I can’t remember giving them a moment’s thought.
Then, after a few years of saying to students (with appropriate hand gestures), ‘This is for things that are near to us, and that is for things that are far away’, I started to get interested in ‘text analysis’ and ‘cohesive devices’, and went a bit over-the-top, getting students to highlight determiners, and the words or phrases they referred to, in a complex code of colours and arrows that made their handouts look like early abstract art.
By the time I met my first English for Academic Purposes class, however, I’d calmed down a little.
‘The appropriate use of demonstrative determiners’ was helpfully listed as a ‘teaching outcome’ on our EAP course pro forma and, although I got into the habit of projecting short texts onto the OHP screen in order to discuss the function of a this or that, or reformulating sentences on the whiteboard to include an appropriate determiner, I never seemed to get that satisfying look in students’ eyes that here was something they could easily take away and use themselves”.