Topic: Composition

This lesson looks at how you might use your knowledge of prepositions and preposition phrases to write a short story aimed at children.

Using corpora to investigate prepared speeches

One very simple approach to using corpora in English lessons is to pull apart a speech using the website WordClouds, which can be found here. WordClouds creates simple but beautiful images made up of words in a text that you can input.

Prepositions are particularly important when trying to communicate instructions about time and place.

The Activity page appears in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. The Activity page contains one slide: an example of instructional writing from our corpus. You can see that quite precise instructions are given as part of a recipe. It is reprinted below with the prepositions highlighted.

This task is about using verbs and modal verbs in different ways. We all know that people can be direct or indirect in the ways they phrase things. We often use commands to give instructions, but sometimes these might be seen as too direct and blunt. We sometimes soften them with modal verbs, among other tools.