Topic: Lessons

In this exercise, students make changes to pronouns in texts, and evaluate the effects of those changes.

Goals

• Identify first, second, and third person pronouns, and practise switching from one to another.
• Evaluate the effects of writing using different personal pronouns.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will make changes to existing texts by changing the personal pronouns in those texts.

In this lesson, students look at phrases conjoined by coordinating conjunctions.

Goals

• Identify different types of phrases which have been conjoined with coordinating conjunctions.
  
• Consider the effect of conjoining more than one phrase.
• Consider the effect of omitting coordinating conjunctions.
  

Lesson plan

Click on the interactive whiteboard icon (top right) and work through the following slides with students.

In this activity, students will be asked to find different ways to express a similar meaning. You may be surprised at just how many different ways you can find! The activity is based on an idea from Max Morenberg’s book Doing Grammar (3rd edition, Oxford University Press, 2002).

In this exercise you can see what happens when you move elements, particularly Direct Objects, earlier in the clause.

In this lesson, students examine word choice in a pair of published reviews.

Goals

• Identify words with particular effects in a particular genre of English writing, the review.
• Discuss the effects of word choice in real language in use.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will look at two published reviews and analyse the language choices that the writers made.

Why do writers use some words and not others? This lesson looks at word choice options, both grammatical and semantic.

What are the most frequently used words in English? And could we do without them?

Goals

• Use implicit grammatical knowledge to translate examples of infant speech into complete sentences.
• (For older students) use explicit grammatical knowledge to identify the types of changes that have been made in translating from the original examples.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will look at some real examples of English spoken by infants, and translate it into adult speech.

In this activity we will look at suffixes which change verbs and adjectives into nouns. This process is a part of derivational morphology.