Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (35 page)

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Superlatives: This one is the best. This is
the
most expensive.

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Ordinal numbers: This is
the
first time.

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The activity of playing an instrument: She plays t
he
saxophone.

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An entire group of people or animals:
The
Chinese seem industrious.

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Decades: I was born in
the
seventies.

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When there’s only one of something:
The
sun was shining when
the
Prime Minister met
the
Queen.

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Republics and kingdoms:
the
United Kingdom.

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Countries made up of separate states, islands and so on:
the
Caribbean,
the
USA.

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Foregoing the article altogether

Sometimes you don’t need any article at all in English, whereas in other languages you do. Here are some examples of nouns without articles that may surprise your students.

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Very general ideas: People love humour.

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Countries: I’m off to France.

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Languages: I speak Gujarati.

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Meals in general: I have dinner quite early.

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People’s names: Queen Elizabeth arrived.

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Single mountains and lakes: Mount Fuji is huge.

Describing Adjectives and Adverbs

Once your students have learnt the basic building blocks of sentences in English they need to work on making them a little more interesting, which is where modifiers come in.

Sprucing up a noun with an adjective

An adjective is a word you use to give more information about a noun or pronoun in a sentence. You can use an adjective to describe, identify or say how much or many in relation to a noun.

When you use a noun in a sentence, it’s more interesting to describe that noun and give an idea of what it’s like.

The simple sentence,
She sits on the sofa
is grammatically accurate but rather dull. Although the student who wrote it may feel content, you can get him to identify the noun and imagine the details about it, by asking questions about it: What colour is the sofa? What is it made of? How does it feel? and so on.

An improvement would be: She sits on the
cheap, black
sofa. The sentence is already more descriptive because there are two adjectives,
cheap
and
black
.

In English, words made from nouns and verbs but with ‘able’ at the end are generally adjectives. For example, ‘peace’ is a noun but ‘peaceable’ is the adjective and ‘adore’ is a verb but ‘adorable’ is the adjective.

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Running through the types of adjectives

Adjectives come in three main flavours: describing, identifying and quantifying. The following sections take you through the uses of each variety.

Describing

Many adjectives tell you what the noun is like. For example, instead of just talking about a bag, you can say that it’s
a large, leather
bag
.
The descriptive adjectives tell you that the bag is
large
and
leather.

Some examples of descriptive adjectives are:

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Colours:
Blue, turquoise, pale.

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Materials:
Woollen, metallic, granite.

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Shapes:
Oval, rectangular, round.

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Opinion:
Nasty, tremendous, absurd.

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Tastes:
Bitter, tasty, sweet.

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Comparatives and superlatives:
Better, best, most exciting.

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Nationalities:
British, Jamaican, Irish.

Identifying

At times the adjective tells you who a noun belongs to. These words are called possessive adjectives. So rather than saying the jacket of my brother, you can use ’s after the name of the person who owns something (my brother’s jacket) or use a possessive adjective, his jacket.

The possessive adjectives are:

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My

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Your

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His/her/its

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Our

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Their

Or you can point out which noun you’re referring to by using these adjectives, which are a little more specific than using an article:

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This

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These

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That

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Those

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Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It
Quantifying

Another use of adjectives is to say how many of an item there are.

Adjectives related to quantity can range from a simple number (one, a thousand, a million) to words like these: each, every, either, neither, both, any, some, none, more, many, all, few and enough.

Using adjectives in order

Once students get the hang of what an adjective is, they put them in all over the place. Unfortunately, that creates another problem because sentences can sound somewhat odd if you don’t put the adjectives in the right order.

The sentence ‘There’s a German, old, ugly car in the street’. is very easy to understand but just doesn’t sound right. Surely it should be: ‘There’s an
ugly,
old, German
car in the street’.

You need to teach your students a rule for lining up their adjectives. In reality, you can’t cover every line up of adjectives possible, but Table 15-1 offers a guide which works most of the time.

Table 15-1

Example of Adjective Order

Whose/

How

Opinion

Size/

Age

Colour

Origin

What It’s

What

Which

Many

Shape

Made Of

It’s For

a

few

great

oval

old

golden

Japanese

acrylic

coffee

his

ninety

awful

narrow

new

white

American

straw

driving

these

two

rude

tall

young

bright

Tribal

ice

bath

For example you can describe items this way: those twenty fantastic, beige, ceramic flower pots and my funny, blue, Aboriginal wall hanging.

Expanding on verbs with adverbs

Adverbs
are words that describe verbs. They say how the verb is carried out and, like adjectives, they make sentences more interesting. The same accurate but dull sentence used in the section on adjectives –
She sits on the sofa
– offers no evidence of how she sits. You can ask the student for more information, and may be presented with: She sits
elegantly
on the sofa.

Now you can imagine how she sits because of the word ‘elegantly’, which is an adverb. She may also sit lazily, well or sleepily as these are all adverbs too.

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You can point out to students that most adverbs in English end with ‘ly’. But note that many adverbs don’t. ‘Fast’ and ‘hard’ don’t change whether they’re adverbs or adjectives and the adverb form of ‘good’ is ‘well’.

Sometimes adverbs describe an adjective or even another adverb. In the next examples the italicised adverb describes the bold adjective and adverb, respectively:

The statue was
really
huge
.

She does that
particularly
well
.

Looking at types of adverbs

The first adverbs students learn are often
adverbs of frequency
that tell you how often something takes place. They’re words such as:

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Always

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Generally

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Often

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Sometimes

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Occasionally

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Hardly ever

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Never

Other kinds of adverbs describe:

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Time:
nowadays, today.

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Degree:
quite, rather.

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Place:
somewhere, here.

Truly, madly, deeply: The rules of using adverbs

What often confuses students is the position of adverbs in a sentence.

Most adverbs go after the verb in a sentence if the adverb is describing the verb. For example:

They

play

professionally
.

On the other hand, adverbs that describe transitive verbs go after the object of the verb. I discuss transitive verbs earlier in this chapter. For example,
to
raise
is transitive because you always speak about raising something in particular. In the following sentence the object is
the cup
: The winner raised the cup
triumphantly
.

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When the adverb shows how strong or weak an idea is (these are called adverbs of degree or intensifiers), you put the adverb before the word it refers to. For example:

How warm is it? It’s
fairly
warm.

However, enough goes after the word it refers to:

It’s

warm

enough
.

Adverbs of time can be used in different positions in a sentence. It’s easier for students to go by the rule of thumb that you should put them at the beginning or end of a clause (part of a sentence with its own subject and verb):
This afternoon
I’m free/ I’m free
this afternoon
.

Adverbs of frequency go between the subject and the verb as a general rule: I
always
speak to her
.

When the main verb is ‘to be’, in one form or another, the word order is different because the adverb goes after the verb: I am
usually
busy.

In some tenses there’s a main verb and auxiliary verb. You fit the adverb between the main verb and auxiliary verb, even if the main verb is a form of

‘to be’: They were
always
talking. I have
often
been here.

Although you can use adverbs in other positions within a sentence, you should aim to give your students a model that allows them to get it right most of the time. They’ll notice other possibilities in time.

Connecting with Conjunctions

You use a
conjunction
to join two sentences or even two words together.

Some of the more common conjunctions are: but, and, or/nor, for, yet, so, because, while, since.

Conjunctions can be just one word, but sometimes they’re two words. For example: ‘so that’ – and even three, such as ‘in order that’.

Differentiating conjunctions

The family of conjunctions is composed of three members:

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Coordinating conjunctions
join two sentences together when each sentence is as important as the other. So you can teach students to change from writing two short sentences to one longer one:

She sits on the sofa. She reads her book.

She sits on the sofa
and
reads her book.

Michael plays well. He can’t jump high.

Michael plays well
but
he can’t jump high.

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Subordinating conjunctions
work in sentences with two distinct parts where the understanding of one part depends on understanding the other:

We must go now. We might be late.

We will be late
unless
we go now.

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Correlative conjunctions
work together in pairs, so you can’t usually use one without the other:

I don’t want milk. I want sugar.

I

want

neither
milk
nor
sugar.

Weaving conjunctions into

writing and speaking

You teach each individual conjunction one by one. For example, ‘and’, ‘but’

and ‘because’ usually appear in elementary level course books, then when students get used to longer sentences and varied tenses they learn more sophisticated conjunctions such as ‘whereas’ and ‘however’.

Rules surround each conjunction too, which is all the more reason to work through them slowly and progressively, but once you’ve presented a few, the best way to get students using them frequently is by using practice exercises.

Giver your students sentences with lists and have them write them using ‘and’

before the last item:

I like tea/coffee/hot/chocolate. Answer: I like tea, coffee and hot chocolate.

He went /bank/ park/ friend’s house. Answer: He went to the bank, the park and a friend’s house.

She is /big/bold/beautiful. Answer: She is big, bold and beautiful.

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You can have students fill in the gaps with an appropriate conjunction: I love going to the cinema . . . I don’t think I can go tonight . . . I have no money. . . . my dad lends me a few pounds, I will have to stay home.

Money is going to be a problem . . . I start my new job.

In addition to written exercises like these you can put individual conjunctions on cards and get students to come up with a sentence about their own lives including the word you give them.