Teach English in Windsor - TESOL Courses

Unit 2 discussed the parts of speech of the English language. Nouns come in five main types, common, proper, compound, abstract, and collective. They are further broken down into countable and uncountable types. For example, the noun music is a common noun that is uncountable. Because it is uncountable we cannot use it with an indefinite article or pluralize it. The word emotion is an abstract noun that is countable; we can say an emotion and can pluralize it to emotions. Next we reviewed how adjectives are words that describe nouns. Words like old, fast, and purple are adjectives. When listing multiple adjectives, a good rule is size-age-color-material-noun. When comparing two things, we use comparative adjectives like better, faster, and smarter. When comparing more than two things we use superlative adjectives like best, worst, and fastest. We need to pay attention to letter doubling sometimes, like in thin ? thinnest. As always, there are some words that don't follow the pattern as in the case of good, better, best. Articles are broken into two types, definite and indefinite. The definite article is ?the? and refers to a specific thing. If we talk about ?the football? we have a specific football in mind. The indefinite articles are ?a? and ?an? and these refer to a non-specific thing. If I say ?throw me a football? I am not being specific about which football. Some nouns don't require articles and sometimes they are said to have a zero article like in the instance of ?coffee is good?. We could say the coffee is good, but without the article it implies that we are talking about coffee in general. Verbs are broken into action verbs and state verbs. In ?I watch TV? watch is an action verb while in ?The weather seems bad? seems is a state verb. Verbs can also be transitive or intransitive. A transitive verb takes an object, while an intransitive verb does not. In ?I eat broccoli? eat is a transitive verb because it takes the object broccoli. In ?I sleep a lot? sleep is intransitive because it doesn?t take an object. Verbs can be put in present, past simple, past participle, or present participle tense. A regular example is study- studied- studied- studying. An irregular example is begin- began- begun- beginning. The auxiliary verbs do, have, and be help form the structure of a sentence. Adverbs modify verbs, or other adjectives or adverbs. Adverbs are usually formed by adding -ly, but there are irregular cases. For multiple adverbs, a good rule is place-manner-time when ordering the words. A gerund is the -ing form of a verb being used as a noun. For example in ?playing tennis is fun?, playing is a gerund. A pronoun is a place holder for a more specific word. The four types are personal, possessive, reflexive, and relative. In the sentence ?You are smart?, you is filling the place of the person's Name. Prepositions include at, on, from, and above and they show the relationship between the subject and some other word in the sentence. Conjunctions have the simple function of joining two parts of a sentence together and showing how they are related. Some examples are and, but, or, nor, and yet.