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Glossary: inflection

Explanation

When we add -ed to walk, or change mouse to mice, this change of morphology produces an inflection (‘bending’) of the basic word which has special grammar (e.g. past tense or plural). In contrast, adding -er to walk produces a completely different word, walker, which is part of the same word family. Inflection is sometimes thought of as merely a change of ending, but, in fact, some words change completely when inflected.

  • dogs is an inflection of dog.
  • went is an inflection of go.
  • better is an inflection of good.

An inflection is a change to the base form of a word to express grammatical information, usually by adding an ending (or suffix). Sometimes inflection involves another kind of change to the base form (e.g. mouse/mice).

Baby Sentences

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.

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Baby Sentences: Activity

Daddy go work

Mummy read

Daddy bike

What that

Where blanket

Sock off

Teddy fall

Sammy tired

Contractions

Words like I'm, don't, and should've, which involve two words being joined together, are often called contractions. This lesson explores the many different types of words in this category, and the similarities and differences between them.

Goals

  • Describe examples of contractions.
  • Categorise a set of contractions.
  • Identify the differences between categories of contractions.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will study contractions.

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Y6 GPaS Test: A or an?

In each of the following examples, indicate whether the space should be filled with a or an:

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Y6 GPaS Test: Forms of 'be'

Select the correct form of be:

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Y6 GPaS Test: Forms of 'be': Advanced

Select the correct form of be:

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Y6 GPaS Test: Select the pronouns

In each of the following examples, select the pair of pronouns that correctly fills the blanks:

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Y6 GPaS Test: Select the verb form

Select the correct verb form for each example.

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Y6 GPaS Test: Spelling plurals

Select the correct plural form:

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Verbs

Verbs have traditionally been described as ‘doing words’ or ‘action words’. This works well for some verbs, like sprint, chatter, eat. Here are some sentence examples with verbs which describe actions:

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Word structure

The study of word structure is called morphology. Understanding word structure helps us:

  • improve spelling
  • expand vocabulary

In studying word structure, we start by looking at a few key concepts first:

  • root words
  • prefixes
  • suffixes

Root words are words, or parts of words, that can usually stand alone. The following are all root words:

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Word structure: Inflection

Inflection is the process by which a single word takes different forms. For example, if we have the noun cat, we can add a plural ending to it to create cats. This is known as inflecting a noun and the ending we add is called a suffix.

What are the plural forms of the following nouns?

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