Brazilian Carnival Party

  Let's begin our examination of parts of speech with nouns. Nouns are our naming words. They name a person or people, such as Jack, Jill, brother, Prime Minister. We have a place or places such as kitchen, Tokyo. Things or the things around us: pen, light, camera. We have our concepts and ideas: beauty, democracy. These people, things, places and concepts fall into two basic subcategories. Those subcategories are countable and uncountable. As their name suggests, the differentiation here is whether or not we can count our nouns or if we cannot count them. We have our countable nouns: dogs, pens, are two examples. The very nature of the words means that we can count these nouns one dog or 5, 10. Then, we have our uncountable nouns. The nouns that cannot be separated: music, bread....  [Read more]

  Moving down our list of parts of speech, we have our verbs. The first big difference between verbs that we need to look at is whether it's an action verb or a state verb. Our action verbs, as the name suggests, mean that we typically can see these things in action. We can see people working and we certainly see people going to various places. Now, we have our state verbs. These are basically indicating a state of being. Two examples would be "seem" and "have" or "own". We have a sentence such as "He seems angry." and "I own my house." You can't actually see the action happening, even though those words are used as verbs. A very big differentiation between the two here as well is, state verbs typically don't take the progressive or continuous form. That form is the verb "+ing". As...  [Read more]

  Now, let's move on to our adverbs. Rather than describing nouns, our adverbs describe our verbs. There are four types of adverbs when describing verbs. They are manner. These describe how things are done. Two examples are: quickly, cleverly. We have adverbs of place, describing where the action happened. Two examples are: here or there. We also have adverbs of time, describing when the action happened, two examples being now or recently. Finally, we have our adverbs of frequency telling us how often the action happens, two examples being often or never. There's also another type of adverb but here, we're going to describe adjectives or other adverbs instead of verbs themselves. These are called adverbs of degree. If we were to take the adjective "intelligent", we could easily say...  [Read more]

  And now let's look at the pronouns. Simply put, pronouns take the place of a noun. We have various types of pronouns. They are personal pronouns, which can either be subject or object. We have reflexive pronouns, relative pronouns and possessive pronouns. With our personal pronouns, we have to decide whether it's the subject or the object. The subject is the doer of an action, whereas the object is the one that receives the action. Subject pronouns are: I, you, he, she, it etc. Object pronouns are: me, you, him, her, etc. In the sentence "Greg hit Pete," the subject of the sentence is "Greg", therefore I would say "He hit Pete," or I could put a pronoun in for the object of the sentence, where "Greg hit Pete", now, I go into "Greg hit him." With our reflexive pronouns, these are...  [Read more]

  And now we'll have a look at both the infinitive and the gerund. Infinitive is the word "to", followed by the base form of the verb. We"ll typically use it after a verb, specifically verbs like "want" or "hope". We can make statements like "I want to go to the beach." We also have our gerund. Our gerund is a verb followed by "-ing", but specifically used as a noun within the sentence. We have a verb plus a gerund: "I enjoy playing poker." The main verb is "enjoy" and, although "playing" looks as if it's a verb, it's actually used as the noun within the sentence. We also can use it with a preposition followed by a gerund: "How about going to the beach?" We could also put it in the front of a sentence: "Smoking is bad for you." Again, the verb plus "-ing" can act as two things...  [Read more]

  The next item that we're going to consider is the use of resource books. There are many different types of resource books available and within those books there tends to be a general pattern and typically the resource book pack will come in a three book series and typically that three book series will be in the form of the student book, a workbook and a teacher's resource book. So for example here are those three books for this particular series called ?Total English? and in the student book the type of information that we can gain from here is the actual background to the teaching points themselves plus some additional information in terms of short worksheets and so on and so forth and tape transcripts at the end for listening activities, which these days often come on a CD...  [Read more]

  Let's just consider next, when using these resource books, the student book, the workbook and the teachers resource book, what are some of the advantages and disadvantages of using those types of materials? Well, firstly, the main advantage perhaps of using these types of material is that it's quicker than actually creating your own. Secondly, the course books that you will get will be graded for a particular level. So there'll be a set of books for the starter level, a set of books for the elementary level and so on and so forth. So you know that the activities and materials in there will have been graded for level. The use of the book can also offer continuity so that the syllabuses have been covered in a particular way by the book itself and are presented in a logical order....  [Read more]

  When it comes to manner of articulation, we have six different ways in which our breath is produced in order to make our sounds. We have our plosives, our affricates, fricatives, the nasal sounds, our lateral sound and the approximants. Let's take a look at each individually and see how they differ from one another. First we have our plosive sounds. As the word might indicate we have basically a little explosion of sound with our breath. The plosive sounds are made through a three-step process. First there's a closure somewhere in the vocal tract. Second there's a buildup of air and finally there's a sudden release of that air like a little explosion. If we look at some of the sounds that are made this way we might better understand why they are called plosives. Examples are the...  [Read more]

  Just to finish off this particular section on lesson planning, we're going to go through a couple of procedures that should take place during the study phase periods, particularly when we're doing the activities. It is quite important that before we actually go into a study activity that we go through a process of showing how that activity is going to work and one acronym that is often used for this is D-E-GO. The D part of this stands for a demonstration of the activity. Now, it's very important that you don't try to explain how the activity is going to work but rather you actually demonstrate the process. An example of the demonstration of the process of the activity could be something as simple as taking the first question and using it and writing it on the board. This will...  [Read more]

  So, the document itself needs to contain some general information about the class, for example the name of the teacher, the date and time of the lesson, what level of class is being taught and in what room, how many students are we expecting, this is important, when we've got things like photocopying and materials to do, what is the context of the lesson, in other words, what is the lesson actually about, what vocabulary or grammar point is this lesson covering and sometimes it's also useful to write out what the focus of the lesson is. So, in effect, the context of the lesson is telling us the grammar point, for example, that might be the present continuous tense, whereas the focus is telling us how we're going to go about teaching it. Another example to illustrate this: Let's...  [Read more]

  And now we'll have a look at our articles. We can divide articles into these groupings: indefinite, using a or an, definite, using the, and oftentimes referred to as the zero article, is actually the absence of an article all together. With the indefinite article, we use it in a nonspecific way. "This is a pen," it's one of many pens. When using the definite article, we use it in a specific way. "This is the pen I'm using." We also use the indefinite article when mentioning something for the first time. "I have a boy and a girl." We use the definite article when mentioning that same thing an additional time or any additional times we mention it. So "I have a boy and a girl. The boy is eight and the girl is six." With the zero article, we don't use an article at all. We use it to...  [Read more]

  Here are some tips on completing your parts of speech worksheet. When providing examples for each part of speech, five one-word answers will suffice for almost all of them. However, we'll need to clarify this for the gerunds. This is basically due to the fact that what you've written can either be used as the main verb in a sentence, that would be the present participle, or can be used as the gerund. For example the word "playing" wouldn't be enough, as it can be used both as the verb or the gerund. So, an example sentence such as "I like playing poker." would suffice rather than simply the word "playing". Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units...  [Read more]

  Moving further down our list of parts of speech, we have our adjectives. Adjectives modify or describe nouns. Basically, they give more information about the noun. Here, we've used a noun such as chair. It could be any old chair. It's only the noun. If we want to describe the noun, we need to use an adjective before it. So, I could say "I have an old black leather chair". Here, we have to be concerned about the adjective order. In this instance, I started with age, as age typically goes before color and then I use the color to go before the material. This is a certain pattern. Depending on the adjectives you want to use, you always have to use certain patterns to which you'll need to be aware of when teaching your class. Another way to describe a noun is by showing possession. We...  [Read more]

  And now it's time to have a look at our first grammar unit. Grammar in its widest sense is the structure of a language. We as speakers of the language can structure our language without a problem. However, as teachers of the language we need to be able to better analyze the grammar and the grammar that exists within statements that we make. These basic parts of grammar are called parts of speech. Each part of speech has a certain function within a sentence. Our example sentence here is "My older brother lives in Tokyo." Each one of these words is a certain part of speech, which we'll have a look at in just a minute but let's just think about the words within this particular sentence. We have ?my?, indicating whose brother it is, we have "older", indicating which brother it is....  [Read more]

  It also helps us form our tenses. Many of the tenses will use these auxiliary verbs; particularly we have our continuous tense and our perfect tense. There are additional tenses that use auxiliary verbs. We'll get into that when we talk about our individual tenses. Another important aspect of our verbs is that they generally tell us what tense the sentence has been formed in. Take for instance the verb "to live." We could use it as live, lives, living or lived. "I live" or "she lives in Bangkok," meaning the present. "I am living in Bangkok," still the present or "I lived in Bangkok," meaning the past. Another difference with our verbs has to do with whether or not the verb is regular or irregular. With the regular verbs, in order to conjugate the verb into the past, we simply...  [Read more]

  Moving further down our list of the parts of speech, we have our prepositions. Prepositions show a relationship between a noun or a pronoun and the rest of the sentence. We have three main categories: time, place, movement as well as a miscellaneous category that doesn't fit the other three. Here, we can have prepositions of time: before, during, in, at or on. If I said, "I work at eight o'clock," I'm sharing a relationship between the time "eight o'clock" to the rest of the sentence. We have our prepositions of place: in, at, on, under, in between. If I said, "The book is under the table," I'm showing a relationship between the table and the rest of the sentence. Then, we have our prepositions of movement. These show movement: towards, from, to or through. I could say, "He...  [Read more]

  When our answers are not correct then, obviously, they need to be corrected but it is quite important that we go through a process of correction that will help students. Quite often they've made a mistake simply because of something like reading the incorrect answer out or misrepresenting what they've actually written down. So, always give the opportunity when a mistake has been made for the student to self-correct first. We can often do this in a nonverbal way to show them that they're not actually correct. We might repeat back what they've said to us in a questioning manner or we may just make a gesture to make sure that they understand that they're not correct. So, we allow for a process of self-correction. It may be that the student has actually got the answer wrong and so we...  [Read more]

  Place of articulation deals with the placement of the vocal organs when producing a sound. Before we can cover the particulars of places of articulation, we'll need to take a look at the various vocal organs and their locations. Moving from the front to the back we'd begin with our lips. We can use both lips in order to create a sound or we can use one of our lips with one of our rows of teeth, usually the top, in order to produce another sound. We also have other sounds, which use both of the rows of teeth. Further back we have what's called the alveolar ridge. That's the bit of the mouth that may get burnt when we're eating a pizza that's a bit too hot and the cheese burns just behind there our top two teeth. That again is the hard bit just behind our top teeth, called the...  [Read more]

  Alveolar sounds get their name from the fact that the alveolar ridge is being used. Again, that ridge is just behind the front top row of teeth. Here the tongue is on or very very near the alveolar ridge. It's typically the tip of the tongue or what's just behind the tip of the tongue, called the blade of the tongue. Here, we're talking about sounds such as ?t? and ?d?. If you say them at home, you can tell the tip of your tongue is on that alveolar ridge. Again, that's ?t? and ?d?, as well as sounds such as ?s? and ?z?. Again, the blade of the tongue is just near that alveolar ridge but it is very near nonetheless. The two other sounds that make it into this category is the ?l? sound, where the tip of the tongue is very clearly touching that alveolar ridge, as well as ?r? or the...  [Read more]

  Now let's take a look at how we go from traditional spellings into the phonemic spellings. The first step in this process is identifying each unit of sound or each phoneme within a word. Let's look at bet, bit, but, and bought. The only difference in each one of these words is in the vowel sound. We have bet, bit, but and bought. Each word simply uses three sounds. Now we have photo. That's four phonemes. Wow we have taxi. That's five phonemes. We have unite with a hidden phoneme in there being the ?y? sound before anything else. Those are five phonemes as well and now we have a longer word: chemistry. Let's give that a shot. That's eight phonemes used in the word chemistry. Now once we've isolated each sound we want to assign a phoneme for each one of those sounds let's do that...  [Read more]