(Grammar Questions I Couldn't Answer)
I was doing a lesson on useful language for cause and effect, and using Peter Pan cartoons as a prompt.
One of the students wrote, “Peter Pan made a mysterious noise, result in Captain Hook tried to find him.”
I corrected her, and said “You need to say ‘resulting in’ ?
She was confused. “Result in” is one of the phrases for cause and effect collocation that the textbook had presented. “What’s the rule? When do we need to use the -ing form? Why can’t I just say “result in” like in the textbook?
I had to think on my feet a little bit. “You have to use the -ing form because it’s the participle clause,” I said. “You could also do this as a relative clause. “Peter Pan made a mysterious noise, which resulted in Captain Hook trying to find him.’ Or you could break it into 2 sentences with another subject: ‘Peter Pan made a mysterious noise. This resulted in Captain Hook trying to find him.’
She gave me a confused look that students often give me when I give them too much information at once.
“I can see you're confused,” I said. “I’ll give you some example sentences with simpler grammar.”
I wrote several sentence on the board.
“ ‘I saw the man running through the park’--this is a participle clause. Now, we could also do this as a relative clause: ‘I saw the man who was running through the park.’ Or, we could say, ‘I saw the man. He was running through the park.’ “
But then I of course realized that this didn’t illustrate my point at all, because in each example we were using the -ing form of the verb.
So in the end, I just had to admit to the student I wasn’t sure why we used -ing form.
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