Grammar doesn't have to be so bad.
Surprisingly enough, when I was at school I don't ever remember being taught English Grammar. In fact I probably wouldn't have been able to identify a noun, verb or adjective if someone were to have asked me. It wasn't until I came to Japan to become a conversation teacher that I realised how lacking my skills were in that department. It seems ironic now that the only criteria for working at a well established and famous English conversation school was being a native speaker. Students would ask me to explain things and I would have to bluff my way through.
It has been 6 years now since I began teaching and I can honestly say my knowledge of English Grammar has improved, but it wasn't fun trying to learn it. It was boring reading various books on the parts of speech, sentences, predicate adjectives etc.
Recently I came across a method for learning grammar which was popular in the old days, and which has passed out of fashion known as sentence diagramming. This is basically a technique where sentences are broken down into their component parts and arranged according to certain rules. This allows you to really break the sentence down and understand the significance of the words in the sentence.
Here is an example based on a fact about today's date:
This sentence begins with a prepositional phrase "In 1066" which tells us when the action in the sentence happened so acts as an adverb. The subject is the noun "Harold". The verb is "became". "King" is the subject complement. This is modified by an article "the" and a prepositional phrase acting as an adjective: "of England". By diagramming the sentence we can find out how to create grammatically correct sentences. We can also learn to identify how the parts of the sentence interact with each other.
Before we are able to diagram a sentence though we need to be able to recognise the 8 different parts of speech used to create sentences:
- verb
- noun
- adjective
- adverb
- conjunction
- interjection
- pronoun
- preposition
Do you know all of these? If not, why not ask in our next class.
Labels: grammar
posted by Chris @ 19:24
3 Comments:
Great!!! If you'd like more information on sentence diagramming, or lessons and exercises, I have a website all about diagramming.
Come on over and check it out!
http://www.english-grammar-revolution.com
:) Elizabeth
I was surprised to know that you were not able to identify word class until you came to Japan.Because now you can identify word class and explain the words in Japanese(for example,keiyousi or hukushi)
I think that the method is very useful to understand English sentence and it's very effective to solve the questions in TOEIC quickly, especially, grammer and reading section.
Then next week, I'll rember the words completely. Ryo
Thanks for the comments.
Hello Elizabeth, how did you find this blog? I recently signed up to your forum too. This is the forum address for those interested:
http://forum.english-grammar-revolution.com/index.php
Ryo, I think sentence diagramming will help on the grammar sections of the TOEIC. If you are interested in learning how to do it have a look at Elizabeth's site. It has a lot of information on there. I can also show you some things in class next week.
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