Tagged: yang

This one and those ones

😦 Teachers should shift from individual learning to collaborative one.

flag-of-indonesia Here an Indonesian student is translating ‘yang’ but running into trouble because ‘learning’ is uncountable.

This is easy to solve by converting ‘individual learning’ into a countable noun:

🙂 Teachers should shift from an individual learning style to a collaborative one.

Notice, too that the same kind of translation is possible with plural count nouns:

🙂 Collaborative tasks are better than individual ones.

However, this is rather informal and is used more in speaking than in writing.

@eapguru

Nominalisation yin and ‘yang’

In a previous post I showed how you can avoid relative clauses when you’re post-modifying nouns. This is especially useful in IELTS Task 1 writing where you have to modify a statistics word (number, amount, etc.) to include information from the axes of a graph, or from the labels attached to a chart, or from the column and row headings of a table.

flag-of-indonesia Here I want to appeal to Indonesian students to think again before translating ‘yang’ when post-modifying nouns. Let’s compare a few sentences written by Indonesian students with their likely equivalents written by native English speakers:

Modified noun picture
Student sentence with error The picture that on the wall is from Australia.
Student sentence without error The picture that is on the wall is from Australia.
Native speaker The picture on the wall is from Australia.
Strategy used preposition phrase to post-modify the noun
Modified noun person
Student sentence with error The person who teach us is PG.
Student sentence without error The person who is teaching us is PG.
Native speaker The person teaching us is PG.
Strategy used ___ing to to post-modify the noun
Modified noun department store
Student sentence with error The department store that located in Bridge Street is SOGO.
Student sentence without error The department store that is located in Bridge Street is SOGO.
Native speaker The department store located in Bridge Street is SOGO.
Strategy used V3 to post-modify the noun

In these examples I used three very useful strategies to post-modify nouns:

  1. preposition phrases
  2. ___ing
  3. V3

Notice that when you avoid the relative pronoun ‘that’ (flag-of-indonesia YANG!), then you also avoid a common error made by Indonesian students – not adding the verb ‘to be’ to the relative clause.

Try using these strategies instead of relative clauses and see how it increases your score for vocabulary in IELTS writing and speaking!

@eapguru