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Unread Jan 17th, 2008, 08:16 am
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EngliPatrick EngliPatrick is offline
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Default Re: The singing boy is my brother?

Switching the order of the 'ing' word and the noun is usually okay but at such basic grammar levels, I would argue don't start the students down a path that doesn't have more regularity.

Recently, my English teacher and I used this great worksheet of a class of bad students who are all goofing off. The students have to write sentence about the bad students. My teacher told they could rotate the '~ing' to either side of the noun. Bells and whistles went off in my head but I kept silent until she got to the picture of the boy who was smoking and said 'The boy smoking...' can also be written as 'The smoking boy', which to me means smoke was coming from the actual boy.

Personally, I don't encourage this 'grammatical rotation'.
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