Chapter 15

Chapter 15: Stop Press! Student to Deliver Sentence

Sentence

In This Chapter

▶ Looking at the building blocks of sentences

▶ Understanding prepositions and articles

▶ Describing adjectives and adverbs

▶ Joining up with conjunctions

A

round the world there are thousands of languages, each with its own

grammatical system. This means that students can easily get it wrong

when they try to put words together to make a sentence in English. So in this

chapter you find out about the structure of sentences. Although entire gram-

mar books devote themselves to the subject, this section introduces a few

points that students can use to improve spoken and written fluency.

English is basically an SVO language – in a simple sentence it’s subject first,

then verb, then object.

Starting with the Basics: Subjects, Verbs and Objects

‘Things’ and ‘doing words’ are the explanations for nouns and verbs you may

remember from your school days but you have to be a lot more detailed than

that to help your students. Actually, nouns are words that tell you the names

of people, places and things such as, office and desk. A verb is word that

describes an action such as to laugh and to watch. Verbs can describe a state

of being too, such as I am happy. Then there are pronouns, which are words

you use to replace nouns in a sentence such as it and they. I go into these in

detail in the following sections.