Topic: KS4

In this activity, students look at how nonfinite clauses might be used in their own writing and that of others to vary the structure of a text. On one level, this is about creating something that people like to read: something that is interesting, varied and engaging and designed to hook the reader or suit the style you are hoping to adopt. On another level, it’s about students showing teachers and examiners that they know about different forms and can use them in their writing.

This activity involves working with nonfinite clauses to do some sentence-splitting and sentence-joining. The purpose is to develop your awareness of the different kinds of structures that are available to you as a writer.

In this lesson, students will explore new modes of communication such as texting, online chat, and Facebook, which often come in for criticism from people who believe that they are damaging the way we use language.

Goals

• Practise changing voice: from active sentences to passive, and passive sentences to active.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will practise turning actives into passives, and passives into actives.

Activity 1 in the right hand menu presents students with active sentences. Ask students to work individually, in pairs, or in groups and to write down a passive version of the sentence.

Forensic linguistics is a growing area of language study that combines the analysis of language with solving crimes. All of us use language in subtly (and sometimes not very subtly) different ways – so when we write or speak, we leave clues that sharp-eyed language detectives can pick up.

In this resource, we take a quick look at the kinds of clues forensic linguists look for when they try to work out the identity of a writer.

In the work you’ve done so far on ways to identify word classes, you have seen that many words can be identified by form, function and distribution.

In this activity, we’ll look at how you might use these ideas to identify some words which appear in regional varieties of English. You’ll see examples of regional dialect terms in the context which they were used, and your task will be to work out what grammatical role the word is performing.

In this lesson, students explore the features of lies, from a linguistic perspective.

Goals

• Discuss the features of lies from a linguistic perspective.
• Identify pronouns, negative emotional terms, sense terms and causal phrases.
• Discuss the role of context in interpretation.
• Present evidence to support an argument.

Lesson Plan

Background