Teaching English in the German Classroom

Abstract

Certainly one of the marks of an educated speaker of English is the ability distinguish between and lay, but an astonishingly small percentage of Americans comes college with that ability. Surely, then, driving home the distinction with the help of the parallel German opposition liegen/legen is worth a ten-minute digression. Since students are geared learning principal parts of German verbs, a good way begin is ask for volunteers give the principal parts of and lay. Having thus confirmed that there is indeed a problem, one can clarify the difference by asking what hens do and what one should let sleeping dogs do. For reinforcement, the teacher can have the students complete the following sentence: I am not going take that down. By this time everyone should realize that these are actually two distinct verbs. The time is then ripe present the mnemonic crutch: To lie means recline, to means place. The former never takes a direct object, the latter always does. The students should be made understand that if they say lay in the present tense without an object, they have used the wrong verb. The contrastive pairs sitzen/setzen and stehen/stellen are also useful in explaining the difference between intransitive and transitive verbs.