RE : Helping a non-native speaker

[Yves JEAUROND <jingting -at- rogers -dot- com>]

Software developers like rules. 
  (1) Have you had him do the high-school exercise of looking up
     the definition of  a/an/the in a dictionary? That's not a whole lot
     of hoops to hop through :-) One or two sentences for each term.
  (2) The vowel rule for a/an is in the dictionary "a rule", "an animal".
  (3) <grin> Beware of political correctness. There's a difference between 
       a competent speaker and an incompetent speaker, native or not.
       If he is competent, then a dictionary ought to do it.
       If not, another poster made an excellent suggestion that some
       ESL work may be needed.
  (4) Someone else suggested a cheat sheet. That's OK for a/an, especially with h.
       But for "the"? Without a definition first, a cheat sheet may make little sense,
       especially if the examples holds words that aren't part of a functional specification.
       e.g., "an animal".
  (5) Don't forget to suggest also looking up a few possessives "its, their..."
    and some prepositions, which can be confused with articles by speakers
    who have never had to parse parts of speech.
  (6) Avoid adding insult to injury by moralizing that it's easy, kids' stuff, a grammar
       school exercise, or worse, quoting that Larochefoucauld maxim (41): Those who apply
     too much of themselves to small tasks usually become incapable of dealing with
     great endeavours. :-)
     ("Ceux qui s'appliquent trop aux petites choses deviennent ordinairement
       incapables des grandes.") 
   
  Regards,
   
  YJ

"J.A.W.D. Glennie" <jawd_glennie -at- yahoo -dot- com> a écrit :
  This question is directed especially at whirlers that have experience teaching English as a second language.

I work for a small software company in the US that has a number of developers that are not native English speakers. One of these individuals has been assigned to write his first functional spec and has asked me to help him improve his written English. 

I have a good idea how to address most of the issues I'm seeing (I have a fair amount of experience with editing), but one has me stumped. This individual's native language does not have articles (a/an/the), so he uses them very inconsistently in his written English. The result is text that is surprisingly difficult to read even though most of the text is actually pretty sound. 

Does anyone know any techniques that I can recommend to help him use articles more consistently?

Thanks.

JAWD


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