Topic: All

What word would you place in the blank slot?

Goals

• Examine a poem as a corpus, like a body of linguistic data.
• Linguistically analyse the words used in a poem.
• Create a word list based on a poem.
• Present linguistic findings visually using Wordle.

Lesson Plan

Wordle is a simple corpus tool which allows you to paste in text and create a ‘word cloud’ that displays the frequency of words by their relative size in a cloud.

Starter

Read these three sentences. Identify the adjective in each. Discuss if you can add an affixes to change the meaning of the adjective in each sentence. 

1. This is the only weekly magazine.
2. She had a cold and a red nose.
3. My kids always get too active after having sweets.

Here are some ways you could have changed the adjectives with affixes. 

Starter

Read these four sentences. Each one has a base word in brackets you need to transfrom into an adjective by adding an affix.

What do the examples have in common? Where do they differ?

Starter

Last lesson we saw how adjectives can be combined with nouns to make compound nouns, such as blackbird or red card.

Are these next two examples the same or something different?

• grass-green 
• lifelong

These words are both examples of compound adjectives.

Starter

Look at this list of words. What do they all have in common?

alarm clock, birthday, football, homework, sunflower, weekend

How are these words different to ones like car, dog or house?

These words are all nouns which are made by combining two nouns together.

These types of words called compound words or in this case compound nouns.

Starter

In the last two lessons, we looked at how compound words are formed. But there are other ways of making new words and changing word classes. Look at these two words for example:

teacher, unkindness

What do these two words have in common? How are they formed? Are they compound words? 

Both these words:

Starter

Last lesson, you saw how suffixes could make nouns into people or objects that do a job. E.g.

• Write - writer
• Boil - boiler

Look at these three other examples. What's different about them? 

• Arrive - arrival
• Boy - boyhood
• Happy - happiness

These three examples all use different suffixes to create abstract nouns.

Starter

Read these two sentences. Transform the base word in brackets into a more appropriate word class by adding a suffix.

1. Her assistant isn't doing a good job since he's so (forget).
2. We're going down to the river. Is the water (drink)?

What word class did you start with and what did it change into? 

The 10 most common English words are:

Can you answer the following questions without using these 10 words?