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Relevant for Primary School teachers and students.

Word Formation: Adjective Derivation 1

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. 

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Word Formation: Adjective Derivation 2

Starter

Show learners the first slide and the four sentences. Ask them to transform the base word in brackets into an adjective by using an affix. Ask them to attempt this individually, then in pairs and finally to share with the whole class. Discuss to see if they noticed any patterns. Show the solutions in the next slide. All these examples use suffixes to change a noun into an adjective that shares the same qualities. Also, note that sometimes spelling changes are required. 

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Word Formation: Adjective Derivation 2

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?

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Word Formation: Compound Adjectives

Starter

Show learners the first slide. Discuss in what ways words such as blackbird are different from ones such as grass-green i.e. the first is a compound noun and the second is a compound adjective. Make sure learners pay attention to the base word. 

The second slide explains the difference in forming these types of adjective are formed. See if learners can think of any other examples. 

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Word Formation: Compound Adjectives

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.

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Word Formation: Compound Nouns

Starter

Show learners the first slide and the list of words. Have the learners discuss what they think the words have in common in pairs or small groups. In the next slide, explain that they are all compound nouns.

Compound nouns are formed with a base word, which is always a noun, and a specifying word, that can belong to several word classes.

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Word Formation: Compound Nouns

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.

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Word Formation: Noun Derivation 1

Starter

Show learners the first slide and the list of two words. Have the learners discuss what they think the words have in common in pairs or small groups. In the next slide, check to see if they noticed all the same criteria: they are nouns, formed of base words, with an extra element added to the start and/or end. See if learners know what we call these extra elements. In the next slide, have learners take notes on the definitions of affixes, prefixes and suffixes. 

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Word Formation: Noun Derivation 1

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:

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Word Formation: Noun Derivation 2

Starter

Remind learners of the words they saw last lesson which can be modified with suffixes and which denote a job or role. Show them the three new examples: what do they notice about them? Discuss with the whole class and reveal the answers in the next slide: all these examples use a suffix to create an abstract noun. If necessary, ask the learners to give more examples and definitions of concrete and abstract nouns. 

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Word Formation: Noun Derivation 2

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.

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Word Formation: Verb Derivation

Starter

Show learners the first slide with the two example sentences. Ask them to change the bracketed base words into adjectives by using an appropriate suffix. Allow them to try this independently and to share in small groups before checking together as a whole class. Show the second slide and explain how the suffix changes the word class from verb to adjective. 

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Word Formation: Verb Derivation

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? 

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Word frequency

What are the most frequently used words in English? And could we do without them?

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Word frequency in speech and writing

Comparing word frequencies is an interesting way to think about some of the differences between speech and writing. Which are the most frequent words in speech, and how do they compare with the most frequent words in writing?

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Word frequency in speech and writing: Activity

Spoken English

the

I

you

and

it

a

’s*

to

of

that

Written English

the

of

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Word frequency: Activity

The 10 most common English words are:

the

of

and

a

in

to

it

is/was

I

for

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

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Word order

We have to have some sort of structure to organise words if we are to communicate. That structure is a big part of grammar. Linguists use a term – syntax – to describe word order.

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Word order: Activity

The dog chased the girl.
The girl chased the dog.
The bus has left.
Has the bus left?
The woman with the walking-stick knocked on the door.
The woman knocked on the door with the walking-stick.
Only Lisa ate icecream.
Lisa ate only icec
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Word salads (primary)

In this lesson, students arrange words on the smart board in order to create acceptable sentences.

Goals

  • Use implicit grammatical knowledge to arrange word tiles on a smart board into sentences.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will arrange words to make sentences. All of the example sentences here have been drawn from our corpus.

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Word salads (primary): Commands activity

Look
what
I
found
.

Enjoy
the
show
.

»

Word salads (primary): Questions activity

Have
you
seen
her
?

Can
you
tell
me
?

»

Word salads (primary): Statement activity

He
talked
to
people
.

I
saw
him
in
London
.

»

Words

Activity 1

Show learners the image in the first slide. Ask them to work with a partner and write down as many words as they can see. Share back with the whole class and accept any valid answers. 

Activity 2

Show learners the list of actions. Ask them to put the letters a-f in the appropriate order. Circulate and accept any reasonable answers. On the next slide, disucss possible solutions as a whole class. 

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