Wells, Wisconsin TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

This unit has taught me about the different parts of speech. Basic sentences are formed with a subject doing an action on an object. Subjects and objects are nouns, sometimes with an accompanying article "a"/"an"/"the" depending on whether the noun is an indefinite thing, a definite thing, or a general thing (which does not require an article). Nouns may be countable or not, and there are common nouns, proper nouns, abstract nouns, compound nouns, and collective nouns. Actions are verbs, which can be further categorised into present, present participle, past, and past participle forms. Verbs have transitive and intransitive forms, the former requiring an object upon which to act, and the latter capable of standing by itself. The quality of nouns can be described using adjectives, and there are comparative adjectives to describe one noun over another, and superlative adjectives to describe one noun over a group of nouns. Adverbs are words that describe the manner, degree, frequency, place and time of verbs, and also the frequency of adjectives and adverbs. Prepositions place a word in relation to another word in the sentence, and conjunctions are words that link words of the same type, as well as different parts of a sentence. I have learnt especially much about the specifics of adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions through this unit, as I was not clearly taught about them at school. I realise that teaching new students the rules of parts of speech will be challenging, as there are many irregularities to remember and different ways of speaking and writing depending on the context.