Luca De Mentis

Any English teacher with some experience teaching higher levels will be familiar with this scene. You are teaching a classic, guided-discovery reading-practice class, and the lesson is going according to plan. The target grammar for today is a thorny topic: reported speech. When it is time to check students’ comprehension of the guided-discovery elicitation questions, puzzled and perplexed expressions start appearing on their faces. Questions are being asked, one after the other, and the class is derailed by trying to explain the grammar point. This has happened to me several times, prompting me to wonder why certain grammatical structures are...