212 Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It
Thinking about subjects
A subject is basically a word telling you what or who is doing something, or
what thing, or who, the sentence is about. For example:
Peter loves ice cream.
The word ‘Peter’ is the subject word because he is the one who ‘loves’.
You use the subject pronoun when you don’t say the name of the person or
thing. For example:
He loves ice cream.
Instead of saying ‘Peter’, the subject word is he, which is a subject pronoun.
By the way, subject pronouns are sometimes called personal pronouns and
here they all are: I, you, he, she, it, we and they. You should point out that ‘I’
is always a capital letter.
Students may think that one or two subject pronouns are missing when you
first write them out like this. That’s because in lots of languages there are dif-
ferent versions of ‘you’ depending on whether you’re talking about one person
or more than one, or whether you’re speaking to a respected person or a pal.
In addition to this, in some dialects and varieties of English, people say ‘you
all’, ‘you guys’ or ‘youse’, but you don’t teach these as standard English.
Some native speakers use the subject pronoun ‘one’. For example they may
say, ‘One drinks white wine with chicken’. Although the sentence is correct, it
doesn’t sound very modern and if students say it they can sound rather pre-
tentious. So you’re better off not teaching ‘one’ as a subject pronoun unless
your students come across it and ask you for an explanation. Encourage them
to use ‘people’ or ‘you’ instead.
Students get mixed up for various reasons when they use subject words. For
example:
✓ In some languages you can make a sentence without using a subject
word at all. So, you can effectively say: Peter loves ice cream. Prefers
vanilla.
Of course, this second sentence is incorrect in English because in
English you must have a subject word, but it may well look fine to a
student.
✓ Sometimes the subject word is not in first place in a sentence. Of course,
that’s where students expect it to be so they panic when it’s not there.
