13th class
meeting, Spring 2005
Class Activities: Today Chris covered parts of speech.
Today’s slideshow, with simple, large-print slides on the SIX parts of speech made what could otherwise seem intimidating to students seem rather simple and direct. Students were slowly introduced, two at a time, to the parts of speech, beginning with simple reality (nouns and verbs), moving on to descriptive reality (adjectives and adverbs), and finally to joining words (conjunctions and prepositions).
As he works with simple reality, he discusses and reveals the types of nouns (concrete, abstract, pronouns, and proper nouns), displaying examples of each on the screen and discussing how they are person/place/things.
With verbs, he shows example after example of each, revealing the types of action verbs, linking the linking verbs to descriptions, and showing how the helping verbs are “homey’s” that stick only with other verbs. The force of demonstrating one at a time, on the screen, each type of verb as it either stood alone or was linked with a description or another verb, was powerful, I believe. He also had various colors to distinguish, for instance, the verb and the description. His demonstration of how a helping verb would not “hang with” a description (e.g. Today I will happy) further clarified the distinction between parts of speech.
With adjectives and adverbs, he emphasized the function of each by underlining, on the screen, the –ad part, telling students that these words ADDED to something—added description to nouns and verbs.
Chris categorized the conjunctions also (by function: and + or, but + yet, for + so, nor). He didn’t cover these extensively, but I imagine once he begins run-ons and comma splices, he’ll launch into these in detail. For prepositions, he emphasized the word “position,” showing how often a preposition shows the position of something. He also categorized the prepositions into three categories, from the most commonly used to the more obscure ones, so that rather than students seeing a lengthy list of words, they see a small list of those they will encounter constantly and then a reference list of others. For these students, the spacing of the lists Chris shows on the screen is important. The students are given just as much as they can comfortably absorb.
This PowerPoint slide introduction to parts of speech was slower than I would have thought effective, and I would not have chosen to do it this way, but upon seeing how Chris’s students were latching onto what each part of speech was, this is certainly a technique I will use next semester. I realize, too, that laying this foundation (and not assuming they know this, for at this level they don’t), the lesson is providing a strong knowledge base so that every time the student encounters grammar in future classes, he or she will have a firm understanding.
I noticed too that in the online quizzes, there were several words that had appeared in the slide demonstration (strengthening that memory that, for instance, “purple” is an adjective.