Topic: All

In this lesson, students explore word morphology. Morphology is an area of language study concerned with how words are formed. While syntax is about the larger structures formed when words are put together, morphology is about the structure within words.

Goals

• To understand different types of negation and the kinds of conceptual effects it has on readers.
• To analyse the use of negation in a text.

Negation

Begin by explaining the concept of negation to your students. You might like to use the following definition (taken from the Englicious glossary):

In this activity, students look at how nonfinite clauses might be used in their own writing and that of others to vary the structure of a text. On one level, this is about creating something that people like to read: something that is interesting, varied and engaging and designed to hook the reader or suit the style you are hoping to adopt. On another level, it’s about students showing teachers and examiners that they know about different forms and can use them in their writing.

Try this noun phrase generator in class. Your students will enjoy creating weird and funny noun phrases using the interactive whiteboard.

Goals

• Create some new noun phrases.
• Examine what can and can't happen in noun phrases.
• Evaluate example noun phrases, looking at why they do or don't work.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will be generating noun phrases. 

Goals

• To explore the role of noun phrases in descriptive writing.
• To consider how noun phrases can have ‘descriptive weight’.
• For students to apply this in their own writing.

Begin by asking your asks students to discuss what ‘things’ are in this description:

In my room, there is an enormous swimming pool, and underneath one of the big windows there is an ice-cream machine.

Objective

To explore the meaning of simple, everyday nouns and how they relate to your experience of the world.

Things like a chair, a fork, a dog, a horse, a house, a kennel, a girl, a nurse, a boy and a policeman are something that we can see and touch. They exist in reality and are observable. The names for them are concrete nouns.

Other nouns refer to things which we cannot see or touch like happiness or time. Such nouns are abstract nouns.

Objective

To explore the way that nouns can point to parts and wholes of things.

Read the sentences below very carefully and pay attention to the concrete nouns in bold.