Vandria Sehnem

ESC 529
Journal three
Facilitating academic vocabulary acquisition
In this journal I am going to analyze an excerpt from a textbook, looking for mortars,
bricks and affixes related to my area of studies. I am a TESOL international graduate student,
and I am not in-service yet. The textbook that I chose for this activity is Understanding and
Using English Grammar, by Betty S. Azar and Stacy A. Hagen. I assessed the book to be an 8 th
grade level. The chapter I chose is Chapter 2 and its title is Present and Past; Simple and
Progressive. As it is suggested in the title, the chapter is focused on the present and past
tenses, and simple and progressive aspects. I selected this chapter because it has a range of
activities to work with the students and practice the different tenses and aspects described above.
Excerpt from the book:
She was standing at a sink. She turned on the faucet. Then she picked up some soap.
While she was washing her hands, the soap slipped out of her hands and dropped to the floor.
She bent over to pick it up. Then she finished washing her hands and turned off the faucet. At the
end, she wiped her hands on a towel. (Azar & Hagen, 2009, p. 32)

Bricks = Affixes: stand-ing, turn-ed, wash-ing, pick-ed

As a future ESL teacher, if I consider the excerpt I would say that it is rich in words to focus on
tense and aspect of the verbs. Working with the present and past, simple and progressive, I would

find in the text, lots of words to focus on, such as standing; wiped; turned; was washing; slipped;
finished. All these words have affixes that represent tense/aspect in English.
Mortars: she was; while; then; at the end; at a sink

This activity made me think about the relationship between different subjects and
different words. If I look at the group of words that I got as the bricks, based on the excerpt
from the textbook I can see that they are verbs, but in English they carry an important part of the
message, tense and aspect. When teaching language one of the focuses is tense and aspect. The
focus of the chapter I chose is on the progressive and past aspects. If we look at the group of
affixes for the discipline we will see the ing and ed that are attached to the verbs to represent
tense and aspect. My approach in the classroom would be to work with the simple past and past
progressive by showing that the past progressive in English is formed by using the to be past
form (was, were) and the verb + ing (She was washing her hands).

Works Cited
Azar, Betty S., and Stacy A. Hagen. Understanding and Using English Grammar. Fourth ed. Vol.
A. White Plains: Pearson Education, 2009. Print.