The Word That Looks Right
In a mock Grammar and Vocabulary section, students answer a gap-fill: 'She was so ______ in her work that she forgot to eat lunch.' Options: A) absorbed B) absorbing C) absorbent D) absorption. Twenty-two of thirty students choose B. When asked, they say 'absorbing sounds like a feeling, and she was feeling something.' A second item reads 'The committee ______ its decision until the next meeting.' Options: A) postponed B) delayed C) deferred D) held over - and the class splits almost evenly, with several students arguing that all four 'mean the same thing'. The teacher has one 45-minute lesson before the exam and cannot cover every collocation.
1. Explain the systematic error behind the 22 answers of B, and give the rule the students need.
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The error is a category confusion, not a vocabulary gap. Students have learned that '-ing' adjectives describe what a thing causes (interesting, boring, tiring) and '-ed' adjectives describe how a person feels (interested, bored, tired). They apply the pattern mechanically to 'absorb'.
Why B fails here: 'absorbing' means 'holding attention' - a property of a book, film, or task. It can describe her work, but the sentence says she was absorbed in her work. The preposition 'in' is the decisive cue: the fixed pattern is be absorbed in something.
Rule to teach: with '-ed/-ing' pairs, check (a) who or what the adjective describes - person vs. thing - and (b) whether a fixed preposition follows. Here 'in' after the gap forces the participial form describing the person's state: absorbed.
2. For the second item, explain why 'all four mean the same' is wrong, and state what you would actually teach in the remaining time.
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They are near-synonyms with different collocational and register profiles. 'Postpone' and 'defer' both take a decision/meeting as object; 'defer' is more formal and often implies putting something to a later stage rather than a later date. 'Delay' usually implies something was expected and is late - it collocates with transport, flights, and events more than with 'a decision'. 'Hold over' is chiefly American and typically applies to an item on an agenda.
For a single best answer, 'postponed' is the safest neutral choice with 'decision'.
What to teach in 45 minutes: do not attempt full synonym discrimination. Teach one transferable procedure - 'cover the options, predict a word, then choose the closest match' - and drill it on eight items. This converts a memorisation problem into a strategy the students can apply to unseen items.