Teaching about Verbs and Adverbs - The Fundamental Things Apply - What Really Works - Teaching Grammar

Teaching Grammar: What Really Works (2010)

Part I. The Fundamental Things Apply

Chapter 3. Teaching about Verbs and Adverbs

There’s a lot to know about verbs. The verb acts as the central nervous system of grammar, the organizing principle of every clause. In this chapter, we’ll explain a visual metaphor—a map of Verb Territory—for understanding the English verb system. We use this map to explain the two major categories of verbs, action verbs and linking verbs, and the two subcategories of action verbs, transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. We also explain helping verbs and irregular verbs. We end with a discussion of the properties and capabilities of adverbs.

Dude, Where’s My Verb?

Let’s teach students to recognize the verb or verbs in a sentence in a way that departs from the usual “word that expresses action or state of being.” Those definitions are not particularly accurate or helpful. We suggest teaching your students, simply, that the verb is that part of the sentence that changes when they flip the sentence from present to past tense or vice versa. Try it.

Teaching Procedure: Find the Verb

The simplest way to discover verbs is to look at simple sentences in the present tense. To get these, and to control the kinds of sentences that you are going to work with, you can ask the class to describe an experience, such as eating a pizza, playing a video game, going to the zoo, or anything that you think they can say a lot about. Generate a list of sentences and write them on the board. Keep it simple: “Tell me about eating a pizza.”

♦You need a napkin.

♦It has sauce, crust, cheese, and spices.

♦It’s drippy.

♦You want more than one slice.

♦You order two toppings.

♦You take big bites.

♦You fold your slice.

♦It gets all over your chin and fingers.

♦It burns the roof of your mouth.

♦The cheese stretches.

“Now, all of these sentences are happening in the present, as if you are eating the pizza right now. Let’s put these sentences in the past tense. How would they sound if we put the word yesterday in front of each one?” By doing this, students can see that the word that changes when they convert the sentence from present to past tense (and vice versa) is the verb.

Don’t think that before you do this activity you first have to go over what the terms present tense and past tense mean. Trust that the context, cueing the students to make the action happen “yesterday,” will be sufficient to activate their intuition. After all, your students (if they are native speakers of English) have been using present and past tense—and other tenses—intuitively since before starting school.

Do this simple activity several times to give students confidence that they can find the verb. Then take advanced steps. First, use clauses with compound verbs:

♦The cheese stretches and drips.

♦You fold your slice and take big bites.

Then use sentences with more than one clause:

♦The cheese stretches and the oil drips.

♦Some cheese always sticks to the box, and you try to scrape it off.

Before moving on, have the students practice discovering the verb in whatever text they are reading as a class. They will find, of course, that in authentic text they encounter more complex verb forms, but the procedure will still work. Note that with a helping verb, the tense conversion test will operate only on the helping verb, not the main verb. We are eating pizza becomes We were eating pizza; the progressive form (-ing) remains the same, and the helping verb signals the tense.

It’s important that your conversation about language be about tense as much as possible in the weeks that precede a full-fledged exploration of verbs. Get those “verb words” whizzing in the air: verb in the present tense, verb in the past tense; what tense are we in? how do we know? how would we change the tense?

The “Verb Map”: A Visual Metaphor to Accompany a Detailed Explanation of the English Verb System

Why go to the trouble of creating this detailed metaphor that we call the Verb Map? Why not just give a lecture, along with notes on the board, that explains the English verb system?

The Verb Map metaphor, first of all, creates the vehicle through which students will process the information by getting their fingers into it, drawing their own maps as you explain it. The act of copying the map as you draw and explain it gets students to focus and process. If students use, as we recommend, the inside of a file folder as their canvas, they will be writing nice big letters, so that the process feels more like creating a map than taking grammar notes. The large format creates a memorable visual and frees up the hands for a vividly tactile learning experience. (We like to say “making your fingers smart.”) The visual is enriched by color-coding the different “neighborhoods” on the Verb Map. The color-coding helps to consolidate related concepts, such as transitive and intransitive verbs. Besides, making up a territory about verbs and mapping it is whimsical and fun.

As a metaphor, the Verb Map works well because you need to establish from the start that there are two kinds of verbs: action verbs and linking verbs. Action verbs and linking verbs operate with different rules when it comes to modifiers and pronoun case. If you don’t establish the difference between them, then you won’t be able to explain why I did good on that math test should be said when students mean that they went around doing good deeds on the math test and I did well on the math test should be said when they mean that they knew the answers. Similarly, the logic behind the oft-cited response This is she rather than the more natural This is her can be explained only through understanding that verbs that live in Action Town require objective case pronouns as direct objects while verbs that live in Linking Town require subjective case pronouns to complete them. And when students understand that a direct object receives the action initiated by the subject, and that the direct object and the subject are not the same entity (hence different pronoun cases), but that a subject complement is in fact the same exact entity as the subject, as in This is she, the system actually does begin to make sense! So the Verb Map is capable of making the difference between action verbs and linking verbs obvious. From there, students will be able to learn about the variations and distinctions within the action verb and linking verb categories, treating each as a “neighborhood.” When the map is complete, students will have laid out the features of the entire English verb system:

♦The forms of verbs (conjugation)

♦Helping verbs and modal helpers

♦Linking verbs other than be

♦Trnsitive and intransitive verbs

Teaching Procedure: Explore the Map

To explore Verb Territory, students will need a file folder and a few colored pens.

Verb Map: Day One—We Get an Overview of the Two Sides of Town, Action Town and Linking Town

The time allotments are very flexible. What we are designating as Day One, Day Two, etc., may take several more days in real time. Don’t proceed until formative assessment tells you that the students are ready. If you are using authentic language to teach grammar, you’ll be making simultaneous use of instructional time that will justify the time spent to teach grammar thoroughly without sacrifice to other curricular demands.

Your first lesson will explain “Verb Territory,” (see Figure 3.1). You begin by saying something like this: “OK, now there are two sides of town in Verb Territory. Let’s draw a railroad track running through the middle of town, on the crease of your folder. On the west side, we have Action Town. On the east side, Linking Town. Each town has a slogan. The slogan for Action Town, as you would guess, is ‘Action Town: Where We Find Out What Things Do.’ And the slogan for Linking Town is ‘Linking Town: Where We Find Out What Things Are.’” Without examples, these slogans won’t mean anything, so you want to populate your towns with verbs. For action verbs, use a mix of regular and irregular verbs, verbs of informal and formal register, and a derivative or two. (A derivative, in case you are not familiar with the term, is a verb that is formed from another part of speech, such as visualize, which uses the verb-forming suffix -ize to create a verb out of the adjective visual.) A good handful might be walk, write, surrender, create, investigate, visualize. And in Linking Town, the first citizens we meet are be, seem, become, look. That would be enough mapping for the first day.

Figure 3.1

Verb Map: Day Two—We Venture into Action Town

On their next visit to Verb Territory (see Figure 3.2), students will learn more about what goes on over in Action Town. They’ll learn the four forms of regular action verbs, using the verb to walk as the model. “The verb walk can appear in four different guises: it can look four different ways. You already know what they are. When we talk about verbs, we start with what we call the infinitive. The infinitive is the way the verb looks when we put to in fron of it: to walk. That’s the infinitive form. We also say I walk today; he walks today; I am walking; I walked yesterday; I have walked before. The forms are walk, walks, walking, walked. That’s it. Those four forms are all we can do with our regular verb walk. Try the other verbs and see if they follow the same pattern.” It won’t take students long to discover there’s one oddity on their short list of verbs. The verb write has five forms: write, writes, writing, wrote, written. You can declare that the verb write is an irregular verb and that the class will deal with other irregular verbs at another time. And that’s enough touring for today.

Figure 3.2

On terminology: Throughout this book, we’ll be illustrating the casual but effective way in which new terminology can be introduced. Notice the way you can integrate the new term infinitive into the conversation about verbs. You define it while using it, repeating it in context, writing it, having the students write it. Your use of the new term serves an immediate purpose, and you engage students in that purpose, assuming they can learn a new term if it is defined while in use and if its use is repeated. When it comes to grammar, you are naming known concepts. Students have been using infinitive forms since they were toddlers. They are not learning a new concept, just a new name for something they already know. The same is true for the other terminology: -s form, past form, progressive form, participial form.

More terminology: Unless you have taken a course in linguistic grammar, you are probably unfamiliar with the term -s form to name the form of the verb in the third person singular. The -s form of the verb, which agrees with the singular third person, can be confusing if students accidentally associate it with the plural form of nouns. It’s just a coincidence in the evolution of the English language that nouns pluralize with an -s form and verbs happen to “singularize” with an -s form. Luckily, our English-speaking intuition kicks in nicely to create the subject-verb match in the third person.

Dive boldly into the terms progressive and participial even though you may not feel comfortable with them yourself and are afraid that the students will bail on you. Just go ahead and use them in context, as we advised you to do with infinitive. Again, all you are doing is naming a known concept.

To revisit what students have learned in Verb Territory, you might point out the variety of verb forms they can find on any page of text. Here are some effective engagements in verb forms, using a paragraph of narrative text taken from Christopher Paul Curtis’s novel The Watsons Go to Birmingham:

If you asked Momma why you had to do something and she didn’t feel like explaining she just repeated herself. She was chopping up onions for spaghetti sauce and I guess the tears made it so she didn’t feel like talking. If you were stupid enough to ask your question again there would be the loudest quiet in the world coming from Momma. If you went totally crazy and asked the question a third time you might as well tie yourself to a tree and say, ‘Ready, aim, fire!’ (Curtis, 1995, 75)

Direct students to change the dominant tense of the verbs in this passage. The purposes of doing this are 1) to enhance awareness of verb forms, and 2) to evaluate the difference between a narrative written in the past and one written in the present in terms of how verb tense affects the reader’s relationship to the narrative. This awareness will accomplish two important things: 1) Students will begin to know what you are talking about when you tell them to keep their verb tense consistent, and 2) they will begin to think about what their dominant tense should be in a piece of writing, thus maintaining tense consistency. The “translation” will look something like this:

If you ask Momma why you have to do something and she doesn’t feel like explaining she just repeats herself. She is chopping up onions for spaghetti sauce and I guess the tears make it so she doesn’tfeel like talking. If you are stupid enough to ask your question again there will be the loudest quiet in the world coming from Momma. If you go totally crazy and ask the question a third time you might as well tie yourself to a tree and say, ‘Ready, aim, fire!

What we see is that not every verb changes, only the ones that are in the dominant tense, which is the past tense, in this passage. (There are plenty of words in the passage that look like verbs, but that in fact are not functioning as verbs: to do, talking, to ask, coming, but we don’t have to concern ourselves with those words right now.) This activity allows students to think about verb tense consistency, a pesky problem in student writing, as students often switch tense in mid-paragraph for no reason.

It isn’t important that students nail every single verb in the passage. More important is that they come to understand that a writer chooses (consciously or unconsciously) a dominant verb tense and then is obliged to stick with it. Let’s assume students can recognize that the dominant tense of this passage is the past tense. (If they can’t get to that point, scaffold the question by asking if you could begin it with the words “Right now” or “Yesterday.”) You want them to flip the passage into present tense, using their intuitive knowledge about past and present tense so that it “sounds right.” Generally, the regular verbs will be no problem. (Some of the irregular verbs will be a problem, and we will address that problem in a separate lesson series.)

The verb system in English is much simpler than the verb system in a Latin-based language such as Spanish. This is one of the key grammatical differences between English and Spanish, as you know if you’ve ever been mystified by the process of conjugating a verb in Spanish, French, or Italian. The process of conjugating in English is far less demanding.

Verb Map: Days Three and Four—We Tour the Two Main Helping Verbs (have and be)

When the students understand what you mean by “verb forms,” you can return to Action Town for a day (see Figure 3.3) with the two main helping verbs, have and be.

Figure 3.3

Terminology: The terms helping verbs and auxiliary verbs are used interchangeably. The two main helping verbs are have and be. Another category of helping verbs are called modal auxiliaries. The most common modal auxiliaries are would, could, should, will, shall, can, may, might, must. For purposes of simplicity, we will refer to have and be as the two “main helping verbs” and the modal auxiliaries as the “other helping verbs.”

To explain the helping verbs, you can say this: “Sometimes, it takes more than one word to make a verb. Sometimes, a verb needs a helper.” (Many of your students will have heard of helping verbs.) “Do we say ‘I walking’ or ‘I written’?” Students will say no, we do not. (However, in some African-American English dialects, the helping verb is not present to indicate continuous action. If you have students who speak this dialect or if you read literature in which characters speak this dialect, you should explain that it is a legitimate dialect, but it differs from Standard English.) Give several examples of sentences in which you eliminate the helping verb for progressive and participial forms—for example, *they surrendering, *she investigating, *I visualizing, *he spoken. (Throughout this book, we use an asterisk to signal deliberate error.)

A verb is irregular when its past tense differs from its participial form. For example, the verb walk is regular because the past tense and the participial form are the same, both formed by adding -ed: walked. Once you have to do anything other than adding -ed (or adding just -d if the word already ends in e), then you have an irregular verb.

“Anyway, as you already know, we use the helping verb be, in some form, to create what we call the progressive tense: I am walking, she is investigating, I am visualizing, he is speaking. Are these actions going on right now or in the past? Because these actions are going on right now, we say that these verbs are in the present progressive tense. In other words, the actions are in progress.”

At this point, you might want to go into the subtle difference between the present progressive and the plain old present tense. Students know, although they probably have never expressed it, that the plain old present tense (I write) refers to habitual action: I write in my journal every day. They also know that the present progressive tense (I am writing) refers to action that is in progress or even in the future (I am going to California does not necessarily mean that I am in transit; it can refer to a planned trip for the future). I am texting my friends means I’m doing that right now, but it also can mean that I intend to text a friend in the near future. (Often, students use this form when telling a story: So, I’m like texting, and my English teacher, she’s like ‘Stop texting in the middle of class,’ and I’m like calm down, and she’s all don’t tell me to calm down, and I’m like . . .

-ing without be: The -ing form (present participle) without the helping verb be is used either as an adjective (the dancing bear) or as a noun (the dancing of the bear).

You get the picture. The point is that we use one of the forms of be as a helping verb along with the -ing form to, like, create the present progressive tense. And you may need to assure your students that they already know the process—all you are doing is teaching them what the verb forms and tenses are called so you can talk about their writing.

So, for the time being, that’s how it rolls with the helping verb be. Let’s look at have, the other of the two main helping verbs. When is it used?

Writing *would of, etc., for would have, etc., is a persistent common error in student writing because students don’t understand the verb system and are going strictly by the sound of would’ve, which they take for *would of. If your teaching of have as a helping verb alleviates the *would of problem, it will be worth every penny of your efforts.

The procedure for teaching the helping verb have has to be a bit different from what you did to teach the helping verb be because have’s usage is less intuitive. What we mean by that is students can indeed say “He walked.” So you can approach the lesson by asking students to think about the difference in meaning between He walked to school every day and He has walked to school every day. You want them to articulate their internal understanding that the simple past (He walked to school) signifies completed, finite action; that which we are going to start calling the present perfect (He has walked to school) signifies action that began in the past and continues, uncompleted, into the present.

This amount of information is more than enough for a single day in Verb Territory. Let some time elapse before returning, but keep the verb fires burning by talking about how present progressive and present perfect tenses are used in the literature you are reading in class. Increase awareness of verb tenses as an elemental writer’s choice by directing students to be able to name their dominant tenses and manipulate them for different effects in their writing: “Let’s write this in the present tense. Now let’s switch it to the present progressive tense. Let’s see how it sounds in the past tense. Now let’s see what happens if we kick it into the present perfect.” In keeping with our desire to use visuals, ask four pairs or groups of students to go to the board and “translate” the same passage into these four tenses, each in a different color. The result will be a visual array of four different ways of expressing the time zones of the same information. (The reason for having pairs or groups of students is to generate conversation, in keeping with our belief that learning about language is a social activity.)

About the word perfect: Although you can usually use your background knowledge to illuminate new terms, the word perfect in its grammatical meaning is not the same as the conversational use of that word. Grammatically, the word perfect signifies not flawlessness but completed action.

To finish up, consider those times when students can use both have and be to create what we call the progressive perfect tense: He has been walking to school every day since kindergarten.

But wait! What are the forms of be doing over in Action Town? Don’t they live in Linking Town? Aren’t the forms of be, in fact, the most prominent citizens of Linking Town? Well, yes, they are, but, you see, not much ever happens over in Linking Town, for the obvious reason that linking verbs do not express action. If you lived in Linking Town, wouldn’t you fantasize about skipping over the tracks to where the action is? Well, once you go there, there’s no going back. Not that you’d want to. What happens is this: be verbs, ready for action, cross over to Action Town, where they marry up with action verbs and become a part of them. They help them create action. Certain kinds of action. Action that ends in -ing. The progressive form of the verb: walking, writing, surrendering, investigating, visualizing. So active are these -ing forms (we call them progressive forms) that they need help. Help from be. Whenever an -ing word is acting as the verb, it is accompanied by a form of be. We call these be forms that hook up with action verbs to form progressive helping verbs.

We don’t want you to fuss too much over these verb lessons. It’s very easy to go into an overload situation, which would be unproductive. Verb tenses can be quite subtle, what with all the possible combinations of the other helping verbs, as we are about to see. It’s enough to have the students create the map and be able to refer to it, especially when you need to talk to them about their verb problems, such as inconsistency of tense or nonstandard use of an irregular verb. A map is a superficial explanation. Our map of Verb Territory is an aerial view, taken at enough distance to give students a panorama, not a close-up.

Verb Map: Day Five—We Tour the Other Helping Verbs

Here are the other helping verbs: (see Figure 3.4)

♦would, should, could

♦will, shall

♦can

♦may, might, must

These nine helping verbs are capable of extending the verb phrases to create all kinds of nuanced meanings about action. In fact, these helping verbs allow students to express action that did not even happen! It may have happened; it might have happened; it should be happening; it will have been happening; it can happen, etc. The linguists call these helping verbs modal auxiliaries. We will call them, simply, “other helping verbs.”

Figure 3.4

Students who are native speakers of English are entirely familiar with all the many combinations of verb phrases that they can put together with the two main helping verbs and these other helping verbs. They know intuitively, for example, that the other helping verbs can be used as the only helping verbs in the verb phrase: would teach, can tell. They know intuitively that when they use have as the helping verb, they apply the present participial form: have taught, have told. They even know intuitively that to create the present or past progressive tenses, have been teaching, had been telling, they use both have and be, in that order, transforming be into been for the purpose. Pointing out these linguistic abilities to students gives them insight into how their brains work.

What is it about helping verbs that students might not know intuitively, that they need to be taught explicitly? Well, they certainly might not deploy the acceptable participial forms of irregular verbs. Although we generally don’t hear *has teached, *has bringed, or *have telled, we certainly might hear *has sang, *has rang, *have wrote, and even *has took, *have went. These nonstandard variants in verb usage are very noticeable to those who speak and value Standard English in spoken or written form. Listen to the speech of your students (and their parents) and notice the use of irregular verbs, especially in the perfect tenses, so you can redirect their patterns.

Drilling the Irregular Verbs

Yes, in a surprise move, we suggest that you drill your students on the preferred forms of irregular verbs. Why? Because patterns are learned through repetition. Students who say *This has took longer than I thought, *I seen him do that, or *The bell rung early today are using verbs this way because they have picked up on a pattern. It has nothing to do with logic or the ability to apply a rule. Very few native English speakers above the age of four say *It breaked even though saying so would follow a rule. The reason most people use broke as the past tense of break is simply that they’ve heard broke used enough times that the usage has sunk in, strictly because of repetition, even though it does not follow the rule of creating the past tense. On the other hand, English speakers whose language community has modeled nonstandard irregular verb forms, such as the ones mentioned above, do not develop an intuitive sense that these forms “sound wrong.” What “sounds wrong” or “sounds right” depends upon the language style that they heard repeatedly at crucial language-learning times in the early stages of childhood. Good enough, but what can we do about it?

First, let’s talk a bit about why we do need to do something . . . and fast. Linguists call the nonuse of irregular verbs a “status-marking error.” Status-marking errors (double negatives, ain’t, and the use of the objective case pronoun, especially me, in the subject slot are other examples) are, by definition, serious enough to make some people (and those people usually hold economic and social power) cast aspersions on the users. You don’t want your students to have aspersions cast upon them because they don’t know their irregular verb forms, do you?

It’s not enough to simply hand students a list of irregular verbs and have them select the preferred one in parentheses in a list of sentences. Since our sense of whether language “sounds wrong” or “sounds right” is based on patterns, we’re going to have to raise our students’ awareness of the acceptable patterns. That’s going to require repetition, or, as some would say, drill.

But of course we don’t want boring drill. How can drill be anything but boring? Well, if you turn it into a game, if you use music and rhythm, and if you get the body into it, then learning through repetition can become fun, imaginative, and memorable.

There’s a simple wordplay activity called “A was an apple pie” that generates verbs in the past tense. You start by saying “A (as in the letter A) was an apple pie. B bit it. C cut it,” etc., adding a verb starting with each letter of the alphabet. Write the verbs down as you go along. If all goes as expected (and of course, it won’t, but you’ll deal with what you have), students will naturally generate a list of verbs that are both regular and irregular in the past tense. But don’t use the term “regular” and “irregular” until you have the array of verbs laid out in front of you (written on the board). Then, elicit from students that all the words they see are verbs, words of action. These verbs are in the past tense because A was (not is) an apple pie. Ask students to look at the words: What words formed the past tense by adding -ed or -d? What about the other words? How do they form the past tense? At this point you would start talking about regular and irregular verbs. Can the irregular verbs be grouped into categories of like forms? What other irregular verbs can the students think of?

Now, here’s something to think about: How do the students know what they know about forming verbs in the past tense? How did they know that the verbs finish and grab form the past tense by simply adding -ed to the base word (or doubling the final consonant before adding -ed) whereas the verb take had to be changed internally to become took? Students will struggle to answer this profound question and they won’t come up with an answer. The answer to this question is, actually, “We just know. We know from what we’ve heard other people say.”

This little verb wordplay has lots of variations. You could use it to set up the four columns that represent the four verb forms: (see Figure 3.5 on page 34)

Figure 3.5 Four-Column Verb Forms Chart

Base

Past

Progressive

Participle

eat

ate

eating

(has) eaten

bite

bit

biting

(has) bitten

cut

cut

cutting

(has) cut

devour

devoured

devouring

(has) devoured

enjoy

enjoyed

enjoying

(has) enjoyed

find

found

finding

(has) found

Students should create the chart themselves, with your assistance, to see, hear, and feel the verb system. (Your English language learners will need more assistance, but will benefit greatly from the experience.)

The way that students learn patterns is through repetition, but they can also learn patterns through associations. We suggest grouping the most common irregular verbs and having students use their observational skills to draw conclusions about the patterns in the groups. In practice, this is simpler than it sounds. We’ve extended the metaphor of the Verb Territory map to include seven groups of irregular verbs that behave in similar ways. We call these groups Irregular Verb Villages.

The irregular verbs that inhabit Village One belong to the pattern of verbs that have the same past and participial form, with only the last sound in the base form changing:

Base

Past

Participle

build

built

(has) built

send

sent

(has) sent

has

had

(has) had

There are approximately twenty verbs in this category.

We speak of the number of verbs in each category in approximate terms because some (bespeak, for example) are archaic. Although students don’t use archaic language in speech, they will encounter it in literature. Other verbs, such as sneak, may be irregular or regular as a matter of preference.

The irregular verbs that inhabit Village Two belong to the pattern of verbs that are the same in the past and participial forms, with the last few letters of the base verb changing:

Base

Past

Participle

sleep

slept

(has) slept

keep

kept

(has) kept

sell

sold

(has) sold

bring

brought

(has) brought

catch

caught

(has) caught

There are approximately forty verbs in this category. Notice that the verb bring is a quirky one. You would think that bring would live in a village with sing and ring, but, no, it doesn’t follow their pattern. Instead, bring belongs to the same category as catch and teach. By making this association, students can strengthen their memories about irregular verbs like bring.

Village Three is very similar to Villages One and Two, where the past and participial forms are the same, but in Village Three, the verbs all end in the same letter as the base verb:

Base

Past

Participle

spin

spun

(has) spun

sit

sat

(has) sat

stand

stood

(has) stood

This is another densely populated village, with approximately seventy verbs bustling around in it.

The irregular verbs that inhabit Village Four belong to the pattern of verbs that form their past tenses in the regular manner but use an -n ending to create the participial form:

Base

Past

Participle

mow

mowed

mown

sew

sewed

sewn

swell

swelled

(has) swollen

There are approximately ten verbs in this category.

The irregular verbs that inhabit Village Five are, unlike Village One, irregular in the past form and then irregular in a different way in the participial form:

Base

Past

Participle

blow

blew

(has) blown

fly

flew

(has) flown

take

took

(has) taken

shake

shook

(has) shaken

see

saw

(has) seen

This is the largest of the irregular verb categories, with approximately seventy-five verbs.

Village Six is very similar to Villages Four and Five. The past and participial forms are different from each other, but in Village Five, all the participial forms ended in -n, and that is not the case over here in Village Six:

Base

Past

Participle

sing

sang

(has) sung

ring

rang

(has) rung

swim

swam

(has) swum

Also inhabiting Village Six, because it has no other home, is the verb go: go, went, (has) gone.

Finally, Village Seven verbs are the easiest. These are verbs that don’t change at all, no matter what:

Base

Past

Participle

put

put

(has) put

quit

quit

(has) quit

cut

cut

(has) cut

hit

hit

(has) hit

bid

bid

(has) bid

Note that the verb bid does change when used as the adjective unbidden, as in “She arrived unbidden.” There are approximately forty verbs in this category.

Villages One, Two, and Three may be combined for simplicity, as may Villages Four, Five, and Six. You would then have three villages rather than seven, as follows:

One, Two, Three: The past and participial forms are the same.

Four, Five, Six: The past and participial forms are different.

Seven: No change from the base form in either the past or participial form.

The grouping of the irregular verbs can help students make associations that will increase the likelihood of correct usage, but you can’t just present this as information. It wouldn’t be engaging or memorable. For students to learn it, they have to think about it, creating meaning for themselves about the nature of the irregular verb categories.

One way to have them do this is to write the verb groupings (as “villages,” if you wish) on the board. Have students work together to make and record observations: Why are these verbs grouped the way they are? What do the members of each group have in common with each other? What other irregular verbs belong in each group? This is a high-level thinking activity, calling for analysis and diagnosis that come from the careful discernment of similarities and differences that can be observed by the human eye. You’re simply asking students to step back and record what they observe in the physical form of the verb groups. Yet, if you try it, you’ll find that it is not a simple task, but an intriguing one, requiring concentration and mental acuity.

An extension that also helps students to think about the groupings is to have students place a group of “lost verbs” into their proper villages: for example, teach, wring, shrink, break, steal, drink, cast, speak, win, seek, make, choose, get, bet, freeze, seek. Here are the answers: make belongs in Village One; none of these verbs belongs in Village Two; seek, teach, and think belong in Village Three; Village Four would claim break, steal, speak, get, choose,and freeze. Bet and cast belong in Village Five. Wring and win fit nicely into Village Six, and shrink and drink find their fellows in Village Seven, although they form their participial adjectives as shrunken and drunken, which differ from their appearance as perfect tense verbs (has) shrunk and (has) drunk.

Most, if not all, people we know would ask “Have you drank your eight glasses of water today?” rather than the supposedly correct “Have you drunk your eight glasses of water today?” The use of drank for drunk in the perfect tense is so common by educated people that it can be considered correct in modern English, although we all know English teachers who would disagree and lament the loss of drunk as the participial form. (We don’t know why.)

The Irregular Verb Villages are a brain-buster that you might not want to tackle. A completely different and probably equally effective approach that is a lot more fun is what we call the Verb Toss. This involves a beach ball (or similar ball) on which you write various irregular verb patterns with a permanent marker. The idea could not be simpler: students toss the ball around the room and each person who catches it has to recite the three-part verb pattern nearest his or her thumb. The purpose of this exercise is to raise awareness of the pattern by seeing or hearing it in a way that involves the body. Remember, the reason that students don’t know the standard forms of certain irregular verbs is that they have not heard them enough, and they’ve heard the nonstandard forms too much. The Verb Toss (really just an oral drill) can counteract that imbalance.

So that’s on our side trip to Irregular Verb Villages, and now we rejoin our regularly scheduled tour according to the map of Verb Territory. We were ready for Day Six.

Verb Map: Day Six—We Tour Transitive and Intransitive Verbs

For some reason, many teachers slump down in their seats when we suggest that they include transitive and intransitive verbs (see Figure 3.6) in the scope of grammar instruction. They feel squeamish about the terminology. We’d like to relieve you of your discomfort about this topic by explaining 1) why it’s easy to learn about transitive and intransitive verbs and 2) why it’s important to do so.

But first, let’s clear up any cloudiness that you may have about transitive and intransitive verbs: A transitive verb is a verb that takes a direct object; an intransitive verb is a verb that does not. But we don’t suggest that you teach the concept by giving a definition. We suggest that you show examples of transitive and intransitive verbs and lead students to use observation and inductive reasoning to discover their own understanding. Don’t use the terms transitive and intransitive verbs at the outset. Wait for students to frame the concept through observations and discovery and then tie up their knowledge with a name.

Figure 3.6

Transitive verbs

Intransitive verbs

Everybody loves Raymond.

Snakes hiss.

Elephants eat peanuts.

Birds fly.

We planted tomatoes.

The dawn arrived.

We found a hidden treasure.

Flowers bloomed.

I have seen the light.

Summer faded.

Ask students to compare the two columns in terms of their structure, not their meaning. (The meanings are deliberately unrelated.) Students are probably not used to examining language in this way. They may find it difficult to detach meaning from structure. Scaffold their thinking by prompting them to compare and contrast the sentences in the two columns. Ask them what they notice. Encourage them to say the first thing that comes into their minds. Assure them that you don’t have anything up your sleeve.

It’s likely that the students will say, simply, that the sentences in column 2 are shorter than the ones in column 1. That is fine. From that point, establish that even though four of the five sentences in column 2 have only two words, they are complete sentences. You could add detail if you wanted to (Birds fly from tree to tree; summer faded when school began), but you don’t have to in order to have a complete sentence with just two words.

Prompt the students to identify the verb in each sentence. After you mark the verbs, you want them to notice that all the column 2 sentences end with the verb. But the sentences in column 1 have after the verb a noun that is required to make the sentence complete. Although information that would follow the verb in column 2 would be optional, information that follows the verb in column 1 is required for sentence completeness. This is the essential distinction, and you would be wise to end the lesson at this point, keeping the two columns visible.

Examine whatever literature the class is reading. You will find, of course, sentences having transitive verbs (column 1) and intransitive verbs (column

1) . Pick out a few sentences from the literature (keeping them as simple as possible) and help the students figure out if they belong in column 1 (more has to be said after the verb) or column 2 (the information, if any, after the verb is optional for making a complete sentence).

Be prepared for ambiguity: People on the subway were reading their newspapers. A verb like read (eat, understand, play) usually does have a direct object, but it may also be used intransitively. Thus, when we say People read newspapers, we are using read transitively, providing the direct object newspapers to tell what people read. But we can also say People read (Living things eat, Philosophers understand, Athletes play) to make a general statement. We are then using these verbs intransitively, but that doesn’t mean that they are not transitive verbs—they are transitive verbs being used intransitively.

At this point, you’d be adding to the two columns, which are being called “Sentences with verbs that need something after them” and “Sentences with verbs that don’t need anything after them.” Obviously, that’s no way to characterize verbs. There must be an easier way to express what are clearly two kinds of verbs. Conveniently enough, we have the words transitive and intransitive to name these two kinds of denizens of Action Town. We can place transitive and intransitive verbs on the map accordingly, giving the examples Everybody loves Raymond for transitives and Flowers bloomed for intransitives.

Now let’s talk about why it’s worthwhile to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs. Whenever students look up a verb in the dictionary, they will find either v.t. or v.i. right there before the definition is even given. Ask students if they know what v.t. and v.i. mean. They obviously won’t if they haven’t been taught about transitive and intransitive verbs. That means, if they look up the verb elucidate, a transitive verb, they might use it incorrectly. Consider these examples:

want (transitive); yearn (intransitive): You can want a car, but you can’t yearn a car.

withdraw (transitive); recede (intransitive): You can withdraw troops, but you can’t recede troops.

tolerate (transitive); cope (intransitive): You can tolerate pain, but you can’t cope pain.

We’ve all seen student-written sentences with new words that students looked up in the dictionary and then used in ways that are grammatically inappropriate, either transitively or intransitively. We need to be able to say to students: “No, you’ve used that verb transitively (or intransitively) and it can’t be used that way.” The fact that we can’t do this now, because they wouldn’t know what we were talking about, is precisely why we need to teach transitive and intransitive verbs, not the excuse for continuing to ignore the concept. Remember: it can be a simple concept if you present the side-by-side examples, allow students to draw conclusions about their differences, and then introduce the terminology, rather than the reverse.

Vocabulary opportunity alert: When teaching about transitive and intransitive verbs, link known to new by eliciting from students that they already know that trans- means across and is often used for words about going from one place to another. Thus it is with transitive verbs: The verb needs the sentence to keep moving (to its direct object).

To summarize, here are the applications that we want students to learn through the Verb Map:

♦Verb tense consistency

♦Appropriate choice of action or linking verb

♦Appropriate choice of transitive or intransitive verb

♦Appropriate choice of dominant verb tense

♦Avoiding the unnecessary use of the past perfect tense when the simple past would be more effective

The Verb Owner’s Manual below makes a good reminder of the basics.

Figure 3.7

Verb: Owner’s Manual

Congratulations on your wise purchase of a VERB. Your VERB may be used to fit into the following frames:

To__________or I am__________(ing).

To find your VERB or VERBS in a sentence, change the tense. The word that changes when you change the tense is the VERB.

Your VERB may be an action verb or a linking verb. Action verbs may take direct objects and are modified by adverbs. Linking verbs take predicate nouns and predicate adjectives. You can easily find a list of linking verbs.

Your VERB may take helpers. The most common helpers are forms of have and be; other helpers are could, should, would, can, will, shall, may, might, and must.

Teaching About Adverbs

Adverbs tell about verbs. Adverbs are capable of answering certain questions, as shown in the following Adverb Owner’s Manual (see Figure 3.8).

We’ve all been taught that adverbs tend to end with the -ly suffix. It is so convenient to learn about the -ly suffix that many students (and adults) know nothing else about adverbs. That is not a good situation. If the only detail that students know about adverbs is the -ly suffix, it is easy to mistake words like lovely and friendly for adverbs. When students think that any word with an -ly ending is an adverb, they reveal that they don’t understand the concept of adverbs, which is not how they look but what they do: answer certain questions.

Your students can probably recite the definition of an adverb as a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. They may understand how an adverb modifies a verb (then again, they may just be reciting a memorized definition), but they probably don’t understand the “adjective or another adverb” part. (We know that we didn’t understand that part of the definition either, back when we were taught to memorize it in school.) That is why it is a good idea to learn parts of speech based on the questions that they answer. When students understand adverbs via the questions they answer, they can easily identify words like soon, tomorrow, again, very, and too as adverbs. They do so by thinking about word functions rather than just picking out the -ly word and hoping for the best.

Figure 3.8

Adverb: Owner’s Manual

Congratulations on your wise purchase of an ADVERB. Your ADVERB is very useful for answering one of the following questions:

When?

Where?

Why?

How often?

To what extent?

In what manner?

Often, groups of words decide to get together to do ADVERB-like work, and when they do, we call these groups of words ADVERBIALS. ADVERBIALS may be phrases or clauses that answer the questions that ADVERBS answer.

Prepositional phrases are modifiers. They can have an adverbial or adjectival function. To know which is which, all students have to do is understand the kinds of questions that adverbs answer and those that adjectives answer. (You can say it’s not important to identify a prepositional phrase as either adverbial or adjectival, but at least you can explain how to do so, if only to yourself, so that you feel you understand the entire system of grammar.)

Once students can identify and supply adverbs, they can determine whether an adverb is enhancing meaning or just taking up space (because the verb that it supposedly modifies already expresses the concept of the adverb), or if the writer needs to compress meaning by replacing a weak adverb with a harder-working verb. Thus, the ability to identify and supply adverbs can be cashed in for a true thinking activity that involves evaluation and language growth.

Adverbials as Sentence Commentary

You’ll note that the Adverb Owner’s Manual talks about something called adverbials. Just as adjectivals are groups of words that get together to do adjective work, and nominal groups are groups of words that get together to do noun work, adverbials are groups of words that get together to do adverb work. They include adverbial phrases such as prepositional phrases that give information about time, place, and reason. They also include adverb clauses, which you’ll hear more about in Part Two.

Because of the variety of questions that adverbs are capable of answering, adverbials are extremely important. They are the structures that provide detail beyond the basics. Novice writers arrive at the next level when they begin to insert adverbials that comment on whole sentences, opening sentences with such adverbs as unfortunately, luckily, unexplainably, for no reason, contrary to popular belief, and suddenly. These words act as grace notes, giving personality and voice to the written piece. Adverbial commentary words may introduce a sentence or may be inserted, embraced by commas, within the sentence. Like other adverbs, adverbial commentary words are movable. Their placement affects the pace and emphasis of the sentence.

Adverbial commentary words convey the author’s attitude about the subject. Look for them in pieces of writing that are subjective: personal narrative, editorials, reviews.

Conclusion

The importance of verbs in grammar and rhetoric cannot be overstated. There’s a lot to know about them, as we stated at the outset, and every bit of it is worth knowing. Take students on a detailed field trip into the land of verbs and let them enjoy themselves there. Teach the irregular verb patterns not through fill-ins but through word patter and play.

Think about the word predicate and what it stands for: The predicate is the reason for the existence of the sentence. The subject—the nouns, which we’ll talk about next—comes out on the field suited up, ready to play. But the game itself is played by the verb. The verb, in fact, announces what the game is going to be.