"Have you got?" Mania

21 Sept 2011
If you've been following my blog, you know that I've already mention how much some of the British phrases my students are learning are throwing me off. Today, I had the opportunity to work with one particular British phrase for nearly two hours. My teacher wanted to give the 6th grade students a chance to review the grammatical structure for "have got" as in "Have you got any brothers and sisters?" If you're accustomed to British English, I'm sure this sounds perfectly natural. However, for me, it just doesn't sound like anything I would actually say. Instead, I feel like I need to correct each student with "Do you have any brothers or sisters?"
So today, students had to write down two questions using "have got" and then ask their partner for an answer. My job was to go around the room and help students with their questions. This is actually hard work for students! First, students needed to figure out the right agreement and then the right word order. (Ignore the rest of this paragraph if you have no interest in linguistics because I'm going to get a little technical.) In English, there is very few overt differences in conjugations for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person as well as singular versus plural. For example, with the sentence "He went to the store" and "I went to the store" you can see that the verb "go" is conjugated as "went" and is the same in both sentences. In fact, conjugations in each tense are the same for person and number--except in the present tense. In the present tense, 3rd person singular is marked with a -s. For this reason, you have the following sentences "She loves cats" and "I love dogs." During today's activity, students had to figure out if they needed to use "have" or "has." Then, they had to determine the correct word order--by inverting the auxiliary (helping verb) and subject. For instance, it is not grammatical to say, "*Has got Tom a bike?" You might say, "Tom has got a bike?" However, the only way to make this sentence into a question is to use a questioning (i.e. rising) tone. The most common phrasing would be, "Has Tom got a bike?" with "Tom" between "has" and "got."
I studied the technical structure behind these sentences in a syntax class this last spring so I know how this type of question works, but of course you can't just explain this to 6th graders... let alone 6th graders learning English.
I also spent a lot of time correcting 5th graders on a small stylistic rule. The 5th graders are learning about a bunch of different countries. Some of the students are having trouble remembering to capitalize the first letter in the title of a country. Part of the problem here is that students (American students too) can be lazy about remembering to capitalize letters. I've tutored in enough American schools to know that this is true there too. However, in Spanish there is an added complication. Not everything that we capitalize in English is capitalized in Spanish. For example, in a title, only the first letter of the first word is capitalized in Spanish. As a result, you have a title like Cometas en el cielo instead of The Kite Runner. Also, nationalities are not capitalized. So I would say, "Soy americana." Around 50% forgot to capitalize the first letter of at least one country.