Raising Awareness on the Parts of Speech

I'd like to share a way of giving assignments to students. Once in a while I will give a 'different' task to my students when dealing with grammar. In the following, I got them to choose a newspaper article of their own liking which is of reasonable length. They then complete the following tasks:

• underline 10 nouns using red
• circle 10 verbs using blue
• box 10 adjectives using green

This is to raise their awareness on the parts of speech in sentences. Once you have assessed the students' work, discuss some examples in the classroom. Students usually get their verbs wrong. They tend to think of verbs as single words so for instance, they will not circle "to run" but they rather "run". This can be used as discussion points to discuss verbs in the classroom. The same can be said of the other parts of speech in the task above. It's an alternative way of giving assignments your students. It takes them away from coursebook and workbook tasks and try something different. Students will have to read the text and analyse what functions the words play in the text. 

Happy teaching :)

 

 

The Thinking Teacher