More or less

This is the last week of first quarter, I gave all my students a test to summarize what they have learned in the first two months.

We learned three important grammar:
1，Complement of state —— known as "得" sentence, ex: 她吃得很多。
2，“把” sentence, ex: 我把他的蛋糕吃了。
3, Comparative sentence —— known as "比" sentence, ex: 我比他吃得多。

In the test I ask them to write a short essay about "my friend", they have to apply these grammar in their work. A is one of my top students, he always challenges himself by making complicated and interesting sentences. B is one of the students I worried about. He seems lazy, and always give these simple example sentences as his homework. But in this writing task, B's work was simple, interesting, fluent without any grammar mistake. A's work is still interesting, but his sentences were too complicated to understand,unable to understand in the other word.

Who would you like to chat with in real life? Probably B. Language is a tool to communicate after all. I was really surprised. It makes me wonder, did I do something wrong as well?

In my early years of teaching, I found language is like math, very logical and strict. For example, every "把" sentence is structured like:

Subject+ 把 + Object + Verb+ Other elements

And the negative form and Y/N question form will be:

Subject+ (不要/没有) 把 + Object + Verb+ Other elements

Subject+ (要不要/有没有)把 + Object + Verb+ Other elements (or you put 了吗 in the end)

It worked with adults. But not so much with my high school students. I try to recall how I was in high school, I hated boring English grammar just like this. If I just asked my students to practice the simplest way to use the grammar like B did with his homework, using all the extra time to teach them interesting words or talk about more interesting topic, would that be more effective?

Me colleague Mei is using the "Chinese made easy" for her IB students. She was saying there are much more vocabulary and much less grammar in that book. I haven't used that book yet, but it will be interesting to compare which way will benefits students more.

Here is one example how I taught comparative sentence with verb in a more and less way.

I listed below structure in the first class:

A+（Object+Verb+得）+比+B+（Object+ Verb+得）+Adjective+ Other Elements

I didn't understand why my students kept making wrong sentences even when I displayed the structure in front of them. Now I realize how confused they were.

The second class I asked them how to say "I eat fast." Because they have learned "得" sentence, and they are good at it.

I got the answer "我吃得很快" and I wrote it on the white board.

Then I told them how to say "I ate faster than him", simply combine "我比他" （I compare to him）with "吃得快" （“得” sentence without “很”）“我比他吃得快”, they also notice clearly that they can not say “很” in a comparative sentence.

I gave more examples like that in the class, they started to understand the structure instead of memorizing the grammar words.