Module 2: Linguistics
While it would be impossible for us to cover every single syntactical rule in the English language, here are a few more that are directly relevant to your students who are learning English for the first time:
- Every sentence needs at least a subject and a predicate. The subject of the sentence is the noun that is acting or being. The predicate is the phrase that consists of the verb and the object (not every sentence needs an explicit object).
- The verb and the subject of the sentence need to agree, meaning that if you are using a plural noun, you need to use the plural form of a verb.
- For the most part, the best way to frame a sentence is in active rather than passive voice. This means that the sentence “Sammy threw the ball to Jane” is more grammatically sound than if it were passive and written “The ball was thrown to Jane by Sammy.”
- Verb tense needs to agree throughout a piece of writing or spoken language. If the first verb you use is in past tense, then all subsequent verbs with the same intention should be past tense.
No comments:
Post a Comment