Our Cambridge IGCSE™ English (as an Additional Language) coursebook and teacher’s resource are coming. In the meantime, we’ve been working with our authors to create a series of blogs to support you from first teach.
In this blog, coursebook author Graham Newman looks at ways to help students develop sentence structures in English.
Most people’s first memories of learning a second language revolve around nouns and adjectives. The simple pleasure of learning what things are called and how we describe them in another language is fascinating; seeing people, things and qualities through the prism of another culture is, for most of us, the starting point.
But how can we help our students use these newly learnt words in coherent and meaningful sentences? The following three-stage lesson idea assumes that students have CEFR level A2/B1 competency.
People in pictures
Ask students to collect images showing people in various situations, ideally with some contextual information in the pictures – perhaps an image of a student yawning in class or a businesswoman running for a train. There are plenty of free picture sites with these types of posed photos.
Next, get students speaking in groups using these prompts:
- Who is in the picture?
- Where are they?
- What are they doing?
- How might they feel?
Such discussions will lead to a flurry of single nouns and adjectives. This is a good place to check how secure their grasp of such terms are. Helpfully, the new IGCSE specification provides a list of key terms students are required to know. While it’s likely they will know, ‘teenager’, ‘builder’, ‘happy’ and ‘busy’, it’s worth assessing how well they know words like, ‘mechanic’, ‘receptionist’, ‘active’ and ‘curious’. Taking some of the more specific terms in the word lists and then finding pictures to illustrate them may also be a useful activity.
Forming sentences
Using the images they’ve collected, ask students in pairs to construct simple sentences using the noun + verb form, e.g. ‘The girl is walking’ and ‘The nurse is tired’. Getting students to read these aloud is a useful way to diagnose accuracy of subject-verb agreement and also encourage accurate pronunciation.
Once students have written a range of sentences, it’s time for some fun. Ask students to think of some more sentences. They should take their cue from the word lists and aim for a range of people, actions and qualities.
Next, ask them to sketch images of these new sentences on paper, pinning them around the classroom walls. Invite the students to circulate, describing verbally what each picture shows. At this point, it’s probable that much laughter will be caused by bad artwork!
Next, ask students to write a simple sentence under each sketch describing the scene such as, ‘The boy is running’. Ask students to move to a different sketch and add further information. Allow some creative licence here, e.g. ‘The boy is running. He is late for school.’
Here, it is useful to encourage students to decide whether the new information is best expressed in simple sentences (as in the previous example) or whether it’s more logical to use a complex construction such as, ‘The boy is running because he is late for school.’ Spend some time explaining how this type of construction gives a sequence and justification for actions.
Complexity
Once you introduce the concept of subordination, remind them of how words such as ‘although’, ‘after’ and ‘if’ can be used to extend and explain situations. You might investigate the semantic and temporal differences between sentences such as:
If John is late again, he will be in trouble.
Although he was usually on time, he was late today.
After he was late last week, he said he’d never be late again.
Learning about subordination often means realising that clause order can have some flexibility. For the more able, you might explore how rearranging clauses in a complex sentence affects how nouns, pronouns and commas are placed, for example:
If John is late again, he will be in trouble.
John will be in trouble if he is late again.
As a closing-off exercise, ask students to return to their collected images and write as many appropriate sentences as they can (in varied constructions). This is a nice way to check accuracy, and the link between grammatical structures and intended meanings.
Graham Newman is the author of our upcoming Cambridge IGCSE™ English (as an Additional Language) coursebook. He is Head of English in a UK college.
You can find out more about our brand new Cambridge IGCSE™ English (as an Additional Language) series today.
