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Tue 16 May, 2017 06:40 am
Recently, one of my English students (middle school in Korea) got this question wrong. We believe that her answer can also pass grammatically. The school teacher has deducted a hefty 8 marks from her test and she is quite upset about it. Any ideas would be much appreciated!
Student wrote: Our school lunch is very good.
Teacher said that only 'Our school's lunch is very good' can be an acceptable answer.
The teacher maintains that since the school provides the lunch, it must be in the possessive form. However, I believe that since the school provides the lunch, we can simply call it 'school lunch'. Is this only colloquial usage or can it be grammatically correct? Thanks in advance!
@jackie5133,
In British English 'school lunch' is normal. I have never seen it with an apostrophe. In comparison, it would be normal to write, say, 'the lunch
served at our school is better than most' ...emphasising the focus on 'our school' versus others. An apostrophe would not provide such emphasis and IMO is stylistically inferior. It would tend to indicate a non native speaker/writer.
@fresco,
fresco wrote:In British English 'school lunch' is normal.
This is absolutely correct. Nobody says school's lunch. Good luck getting an opinionated Korean teacher to accept that, however. When I was a kid it was called 'school dinner', and still is by many people.
@jackie5133,
It seems that the teacher doesn't understand that school lunch is a commonly used term.
Perhaps s/he could be directed to a good EFL site?
There was a thread about apostrophes and pssessives recently, only that time the poster thought that it was the versions with an apostrophe and 's' that were wrong.
Quote: our school's lunch
It's one thing for a school to be hungry for students, but another thing entirely to chow down.
Our school lunch is good. "School" is an adjective describing what kind of lunch. Very common useage/term.
Our school's lunch = possessive use to show ownership of the lunch program.
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