220 Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It
Foregoing the article altogether
Sometimes you don’t need any article at all in English, whereas in other lan-
guages you do. Here are some examples of nouns without articles that may
surprise your students.
✓ Very general ideas: People love humour.
✓ Countries: I’m off to France.
✓ Languages: I speak Gujarati.
✓ Meals in general: I have dinner quite early.
✓ People’s names: Queen Elizabeth arrived.
✓ 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 pro-
noun 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.
