Parts of Speech and Vocabulary Strategies When we are teaching English vocabulary, I think it is important that we are able

to identify the different parts of speech of the words that we are teaching. This will help students to select the correct word, to fit it into sentences in a way that fits. I am talking here about, in particular, nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. These are the most common and basic parts of speech that you will be teaching in your vocabulary and reading lessons. It is also useful knowledge for when you are correcting students' work. Students will often make mistakes with parts of speech, mixing up, for example, adjectives and nouns. So, it is important as a good, successful ESL teacher to be able to identify these different parts of speech. Knowing what they are can also be useful in particular strategies, so we will talk about some of that also in this part of the seminar. In talking about the parts of speech, firstly let's look at nouns just to check we know what we are talking about. Nouns can be a person, place, thing, thought or an idea. And you can have concrete nouns, things like furniture, chair, bed, closet, door, book, pen - these are what I think of as concrete nouns, things that you can actually show and touch. They can be very useful when you are using realia. If you want to introduce the idea of furniture, you can actually point out a piece of furniture to students. That would be an example of a noun. You also have abstract nouns, things that you cannot touch, things that you cannot use as realia like you can with a book or a pen or a chair. I am talking about things like 'invention', 'creativity', 'decision', it is very difficult to show these as concrete objects because they are not things that we can hold in our hands. It is more an idea, a concept, so that is why we say it can be a person, place, thing,

thought or idea because that will include the idea of abstract nouns, also. A useful technique to tell if something is a noun, and it doesn't always work, but it is a useful technique is to ask yourself can you put the word 'the' in front of it? So, we could say 'the pen', 'the book' but we cannot say, for example, 'the decide' because 'decide' is a verb. You cannot say 'the decide'. To make it into a noun, an abstract noun in this case, it would become 'the decision'. Next, we have adjectives. Adjectives describe nouns, they tell you more about nouns so if you have the noun of 'house' it could be a 'big' house, a 'small' house, an 'expensive' house, a 'cheap' house, a 'dilapidated' house, 'a luxurious' house. These are all examples of adjectives - big, small, luxurious, expensive etc. They describe the noun. The next part of speech, verbs, are typically described as 'doing words' or 'action words' and that is correct. They can also be states - 'to be' is not really an action, it is more of a state. But generally, they are 'doing' words like 'go', 'play', 'speak', 'talk', visit', 'investigate'. And one of the useful ways to check if it is a verb is to ask yourself can you put the word 'to' in front of it? So we can say 'to decide', 'to speak', 'to go', 'to stop'. We cannot say 'to decision', to go back to the earlier example. You would say 'to decide'. Linked to verbs are adverbs. Adverbs describe the verb, they tell you more about the verb - words like 'quickly' - 'to walk quickly', 'to walk slowly', 'to speak loudly', 'to speak quietly'. Many adverbs end in '-ly' but not all of them do. 'Lovely', for example, is not an adverb, it is an adjective but many adverbs do end in '-ly'. 'Fast' is

an adverb but it doesn't end in '-ly', so there are a couple, a few perhaps, which don't follow that rule but generally, they end in 'ly' e.g. 'quickly', 'slowly', 'expensively', 'carefully'. So, these are adverbs. They tell you about the verb, they describe the verb. I mentioned earlier abstract nouns. It can be quite difficult to get that idea across, however a useful strategy that you may want to consider is using related parts of speech - related word forms. So, you may, for example, explain to students the word 'create' which means to make something, to put it together so you might create an object or create an idea. That might help students because you could create a picture, you could show it coming into existence, you can actually act out or mime the creation of some object in class. That will give you access to related parts of the word, so from the verb 'to create', if we can show something being created in class, that will help you access the idea of creation - 'this is my creation'. So this is the object which has been created. Also, 'creator' can be expressed from here - that the creator is the person who creates something. So, I am the creator, this is my creation, I have created it, to create. Also, where does the idea come from? It comes from my 'creativity'. This is a quality I have inside me, perhaps in my head somewhere I have this quality. It is perhaps related to other qualities such as imagination or intelligence. Or perhaps not! Then you may go for a related part of speech - what kind of a person am I if I can create things? If I can make things like this picture or this model? What kind of person am I? Well, that will give you access to the adjective, 'creative'. I am a creative person. So, using these related parts of speech can be very useful for accessing abstract ideas, abstract nouns.

Also, another way of thinking about these words and helping students to understand them is thinking about synonyms and antonyms. 'Synonyms' just means words with similar meaning and 'antonyms' means words with opposite meaning. Students may not know a new word, for example, 'sizeable' or 'massive' they might not know those words but you could explain them using synonyms i.e. that they mean 'very big', 'large', 'massive'. You can use synonyms to explain the meaning of new words in terms of words that they already know, often adding emphasis e.g. it is not only 'big', it is 'very big', it is 'massive/very big'. They may not know the word 'minuscule' but you may tell them it means 'very small/very little'. So, that will help them to understand, using synonyms. Or you may use opposites. They may not know the word 'uninspiring' but they may know the word 'inspiring' or 'something that gives you a new idea'. And you could teach the opposite, something that does not give you new ideas, something that stops you thinking is uninspiring, something that closes down your creativity. They may not know the word 'cowardly', if someone is 'cowardly', but they may know the opposite, 'brave', so you may say it means you are not brave, you are not brave at all, a person who is not brave is perhaps a coward. Or a cowardly person. They may not know the word 'mature' but you may say it is the opposite of something very young, very new. You may give them examples - you can have a mature person, mature wine, it is not new, it has existed for a long time. Then you can concept check that, is this something that was made yesterday, if it is mature wine was it made yesterday? No, if it is mature wine, how old do you think it is? Maybe it's several years old.

So using synonyms, antonyms and related parts of speech are really useful strategies and I think these are techniques and strategies that all teachers of ESL can use and should use to the benefit of their students.