A friend of ours / came
round / the other evening / and / it took us ages / to get rid of him.
The man who wrote that
sentence on the blackboard (yes, this was a long time ago) during a
teacher-training weekend gave me a fine piece of weaponry in the
battle to teach English to foreign learners. I stole his idea - we
called it eclecticism in those days - and drummed that sentence and a
hundred like it into the heads of generations of young folk. I like
to think that even today in Zurich or Stuttgart or Toulouse there are
ageing bank managers and tooth doctors and masseuses who, at the drop
of an idiom, can talk about a friend of theirs and about it taking
ages to get from here to there and how they'd love to get rid of dandruff,
etc.
It was a new idea but
the methodology was as old as Moses: to commit to memory sentences
containing whole phrases which, individually, did not yield easily to
analysis. Go on, mock if you wish, but it worked. And if you are a
teacher of English as a foreign language, please eclect.
Envoi: the writing of
this piece was provoked by discovering two of my old workbooks from
the nineteen-sixties, their pages creased and yellowed just like me,
but full of happy memories and good stuff. Just like me.
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