Our Cambridge IGCSE™ English (as an Additional Language) coursebook and teacher’s resource are coming soon. In the meantime, we’ve been working with our authors to create a series of blog articles to support you from first teach.
In this article, coursebook author Graham Newman looks at ways to help students get to grips* with pronouns.
Pronouns present a challenge; they require the reader to grasp what nouns the writer is referring to. Pronouns sometimes require readers to read across sentences to link pronouns to their referents. For example, consider the way a reader has to understand the relationship between ‘Amir’, ‘he’, ‘his’ and ‘bed’ in these sentences:
Amir was happy to be home at last. After months of travelling, he could finally sleep in his own bed.
Pronouns can be tricky, so how can we help our students with them in an engaging way? The following activities assume that students have CEFR level A2/B1 competency.
Everyday contexts
Start by considering how we use pronouns in everyday contexts such as education. Ask students to perform this dialogue:
Role-play a conversation between two teachers. Ask:
- Do you know why Hassan is absent?
- Why was Maria late for school today?
As well as introducing some light-hearted fun with educational and medical vocabulary (hopefully nothing too gory!), the focus should be seeing the correlation between nouns and pronouns. Take some of the responses and double-check that students understand how personal pronouns and possessive pronouns are operating in responses such as:
- ‘He broke his leg playing football last night.’
- ‘Her mother said she missed the bus.’
Another fun way to reinforce pronoun use is by showing a picture of a large family and asking students to guess at the relationships between the people shown. This is useful for practising terms for family members and also showing students how to construct phrases expressing possibility, such as:
- ‘I think she is his granddaughter.’
- ‘She is probably the mother of that girl.’
- ‘He might be his cousin.’
In that last example, it’s worth alerting students how ambiguity can occur when using pronouns and although pointing to people helps clarify in this activity, it’s essential that a written piece avoids such ambiguity.
Focusing on grammar
During their Cambridge IGCSE™ English (as an Additional Language) studies, students are required to understand the distinctions between types of pronoun and be able to classify them. Terminology does help students to grasp and verbalise some important grammatical concepts. Knowing the ways subject pronouns, object pronouns and possessive pronouns operate is a good starting point.
Building on the previous activity, you can use the context of a family celebration to demonstrate these terms. Here are three examples:
- My grandparents came all the way from Scotland. They travelled by plane.
Here, the subject pronoun ‘they’ helps avoid the repetition of the subject ‘grandparents’. A similar structure occurs with objects and object pronouns in this example:
- She insisted my brother and I came along. She introduced us to everybody.
In this example, the possessive pronoun indicates ownership:
- My sister and I really enjoyed meeting our baby cousin.
Once students have a basic understanding of these categories, you can reinforce them in a playful way. First of all, pin up the following six sentences around the classroom:
My uncle has a new wife. I don’t really like _______ .
Kaz has two cousins. _______ invited both of them to the celebration.
My aunt showed me _______ new car.
My older sister came here by train. _____ journey took 3 hours.
My cousins were disappointed because ________ had to leave early.
The food was really tasty – I loved _____ !
Next, give students a set of cards labelled ‘it’, ‘He’, ‘Their’, ‘her’, ‘him’ and ‘they’ and ask them to pin the correct pronouns in the gaps. Once completed, offer them a second set of cards labelled ‘subject pronoun’, ‘object pronoun’ and ‘possessive pronoun’ and ask them to place these labels against the correct pronoun. Doing so is an active way to check both usage and grammatical knowledge.
Fun with texts
I was fortunate enough to watch a lesson recently where students were using their own text conversations to practise and label pronoun use. Text conversations contain interesting uses of language, often somewhere between written and spoken English. It was illuminating for students to track patterns over a series of messages, often discovering that the pronouns used were referring to nouns used several texts earlier!
Depending on your school’s attitude to phone use, you might encourage students to have a text conversation on the topic of an imagined family celebration. If you prefer, this can be replicated on paper, perhaps even as a solo gap-fill exercise with one person’s messages already supplied.
Grasping the basics of smaller grammatical units doesn’t have to be boring. Active learning, technology and a playful approach can bring even the least inspiring topic to life!
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.
* ‘Get to grips‘ is a commonly-used English phrase that means ‘to make an effort to understand and deal with a problem or situation’
