Teaching Grammar: What Really Works (2010)

Part I. The Fundamental Things Apply

Chapter 4. Teaching about Nouns, Pronouns, and Adjectives

Because nouns and pronouns perform the same functions in the sentence, we will consider them both in this chapter. For nouns, we’ll be talking about the following topics:

Noun recognition and the properties of nouns: Understanding nouns beyond the “person, place, or thing” definition

The morphology of nouns: Understanding the various endings that are associated with nouns

Noun phrase recognition and noun phrase expansion: Understanding how nouns function together with the words that modify them or that form a single unit that performs the function of a noun; understanding various ways to expand a noun phrase

Nouns and the writing process: Using what students know about nouns in the revision stage of the writing process

Introduction to the functions that a noun or noun structure can perform in a sentence

Pronoun recognition: Understanding pronouns beyond the “replacing a noun” definition

Usage issues involving pronouns: Understanding agreement, number, case

Reading comprehension issues involving pronouns:

Understanding how awareness of pronouns and their referents can facilitate reading comprehension

As we did with verbs and adverbs, we will include adjectives in these discussions because adjectives (and groups of words performing the functions of adjectives) build nouns into noun phrases and noun clauses.

Adjective recognition and the properties of adjectives:

Understanding adjectives beyond “a word that describes a noun”

The morphology of adjectives: Understanding the various endings that are associated with adjectives

Adjectives and usage: Understanding how linking verbs dictate the role of adjectives as subject complements

Adjectives and the writing process: Focusing on adjectives in the revision stage

Noun Recognition and the Properties of Nouns

As the Noun Owner’s Manual shows, (see Figure 4.1) a noun is a word that names a person, place, or thing. And, as all teachers find out eventually, this definition is not quite enough. It’s a starting point. It does fine when you are talking only about concrete nouns, including proper nouns. However, as soon as you get into abstract nouns (beauty, happiness, fear, photosynthesis, equality), the “person, place, or thing” definition falls short.

But there’s one way of knowing nouns—be they abstract or concrete, proper or common, countable or noncountable—that won’t let you down:

Put the in front of a word. Does it make sense? If it does, that word is a noun. (Or, at least, that word is functioning as a noun in a given context.)

Granted, this “noun-knowing” technique is not a definition. It is, rather, a linguistic device, a device that works in a way that is true to the English language. And it works beautifully because it draws from the English speaker’s intuitive knowledge. We are not saying that you should abandon the “person, place, or thing” definition (although you will eventually have to add “...or abstraction” to that list, and that is where you will lose students). We are suggesting that you should use the “the” frame to supplement the “person, place, or thing” definition. It is through both these “ways of knowing” that students will come to know nouns accurately.

Figure 4.1

Noun: Owner’s Manual

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

The __________.

Your NOUN is used to name people, places, things, ideas, qualities, states of mind, and all kinds of other things that need naming.

Your NOUN may be the kind of NOUN that can be made plural. Only NOUNS may be made plural.

Your NOUN may be able to be made possessive by adding ’s. Only NOUNS may be made possessive. When you make your NOUN possessive, it does the job of an adjective (see Adjective: Owner’s Manual).

Your NOUN may be easily converted into an adjective. All you have to do is put another NOUN after it and have them make sense together. (COW pasture, for example).

You may add all kinds of modifiers before and after your NOUN. You may replace your NOUN along with its modifiers with a pronoun.

Feel free to use your NOUN as a subject, direct object, indirect object, object complement, object of a preposition, appositive, or subject complement.

You may want to call your noun a nominal when you consider it together with its modifiers. A pronoun may also be called a nominal, since it does the work of a noun and its modifiers.

Although the “the” frame will work for all nouns, there are a few other characteristics of nouns that will open students’ eyes to a fuller understanding of the workings of the English language:

Plurals

Perhaps you can make your noun plural. Only nouns can be made plural.

When it comes to plurals, there’s a lot to be taught, as you know. One thing that we don’t have to teach, because children know it from a very early stage, is the concept of a plural noun and that regular nouns pluralize by adding -s.But we do need to teach, at various levels, the following conventions about plurals:

1.Regular plurals are formed by adding -s. That is the simplest way to make a word plural, and life in English would be so much easier if all nouns would just pluralize themselves in that way. But many words end up with another whole syllable when we pluralize them, and for those, we acknowledge that additional syllable by adding -es. And most words ending in -y transform the -y into an -ies. These are all considered variations of regular plurals.

2.English also has a set of nouns that pluralize oddly, the irregular plurals. The most common of such words add some kind of -n structure: child, children; ox, oxen; man, men; woman, women. We even have a set of words that still pluralize in their old Latin way, with an -i: hippopotomus, hippopotami; octopus, octopi; radius, radii. Then there are those words that are commonly—though not to everyone’s approval—used as if the plural were singular: datum, data; medium, media. Finally, a few words have what can only be called the “invisible” plural form: deer, sheep, salmon.

The irregular plurals are showing their age and their parentage. The reason why child pluralizes as children is that it has retained its Anglo- Saxon plural form. Interestingly, the child/children form is the counterpart to the brother/brethren form, but while brethren has yielded to brothers, children is a plural that has kept its Anglo-Saxon form.

3.Some nouns don’t seem to want to pluralize at all, even though we can easily conceive of more than one of the items they name. We call such words noncountable nouns: furniture, happiness, silverware. Among this group, some nouns can go either way—pluralizing or not, depending on the context: trouble, water, coffee. Such words may be countable or noncountable.

Application: Although native English speakers don’t need to be instructed in the difference between cat and cats, knowledge about kinds of plurals applies to at least three areas of mechanics and usage: spelling, subject-verb agreement, and knowing when to use fewer and many as opposed to less and much, respectively.

Teaching Procedure

Students need the ability to talk about and understand information about plurals so they can solve problems in their usage and spelling. Of course, we don’t advocate the use of fill-in-the-blank worksheets to designate a word as plural or singular. We do advocate the use of constructivist learning models along with the rich use of the key terms, modeled by the teacher by repeated use and then used by the student in the course of communication (speaking and writing). Here are a few suggestions appropriate for the level you teach:

1.Have elementary students make their own charts to illustrate the different kinds of plurals. Send them into authentic text sources to locate plural nouns. Have them write the plural nouns that they find in the proper place on their chart. The chart can take the form of a tree, an artists’ palette, a house, a village, or any other visual in which discrete segments can be represented.

2.Have middle school students convert a segment of text, making all the plurals singular and vice versa. Note that doing so will trigger awareness of subject-verb agreement. Students will have to make adjustments in the subject-verb connections accordingly. This activity is perfect for working with the term subject-verb agreement, a concept your students do know intuitively even though they may give you blank stares when you bring it up. Those blank stares may turn into flashes of recognition as they realize that, of course, they already do know about subject-verb agreement and that they make subjects and verbs agree, effortlessly, all the time, and have been doing so ever since they were preschoolers.

3.Lead high school students into a discussion about the difference between singular and plural nouns in English and those of another language. This discussion will recruit the grammatical terms that students need in order to learn a second language.

Possessives

The next property of nouns to be considered might be that nouns are capable of being made possessive (and one of the “boxes” that pronouns come in is labeled “possessive pronouns”). Of course, we use an apostrophe and s to signal the possessive form of a noun. And when a noun exercises its possessive-forming option, it functions not as a noun anymore, but as an adjective (as its job is to answer the question Which one?).

As you’ve no doubt noticed, the possessive concept is difficult for many people, including educated adults. Perhaps it is because the apostrophe, unlike other marks of punctuation, does not act as a road sign to prevent word collision. If the other marks of punctuation were to go out on strike, chaos would ensue since the reader would not be signaled to slow down and process word groups. (The main reason for punctuation is to facilitate the reader’s ability to process word groupings.) However, the meaning of a possessive phrase without the apostrophe before (or after) the s would still be clear (albeit annoying to a reader who expects proper conventions) despite the absent apostrophe.

Clearly, if you want more students to start using possessive apostrophes correctly, you need to do something other than exercises out of the grammar book in which you edit sentences in which apostrophes are amiss. Here are three suggestions:

Teaching Procedures

1.The “of phrase” test: Every phrase having a possessive apostrophe can be translated into an “of” phrase. This test is handy for students because sometimes an apostrophe signifies a possessive relationship in which “ownership” is not so easy to see. For example, it is easy to see that John’s book refers to a book that John owns: students can visualize John holding a book. But in a phrase like a week’s vacation, they cannot picture the possessive relationship. However, just as John’s book can be translated into the book of John, they can translate a week’s vacation into a vacation of a week.

2.The “backpack” visual: When you own something, you can put it in your backpack. Use this idea, cementing it with a visual, to teach the concept that determines whether the possessive apostrophe is needed: Fill a backpack with its typical contents. Then, unpack the items one by one, as you cue students to write the possessive phrases for each item. So, if you decide that the owner of the backpack is Amanda, the students would be writing: Amanda’s science book, Amanda’s calendar, Amanda’s tennis shoes, Amanda’s I-Pod, etc. You’ll find that you have a natural combination of singular and plural items.

3.The “his/her” replacement test: Because a pronoun can replace any noun (plus its modifiers), a possessive pronoun would fit any noun that requires a possessive apostrophe. In other words, anytime students would say Amanda’s science book, calendar, tennis shoes, or I-Pod, they could, if they wanted to, replace the word Amanda’s with the word her. (And his if Amanda were Andrew.) This is a handy mental device also because when their would be required, rather than his or her, students know that they have a plural possessive.

We suggest that you lead your students through an activity in which you focus on a block of authentic text and whenever you encounter an apostrophe, ask: Why is there an apostrophe here? If the apostrophe is there because of a possessive phrase, then the “of phrase” test, the “backpack” visual, or the “his/her” replacement test will apply. If the apostrophe is there because of a contraction, then you can translate the contraction into the long form. If the apostrophe is there because it signifies the plural of a single letter or number, then you can note the convention that requires an apostrophe in these situations. Help your students construct a three-column graphic organizer to sort out the three reasons for an apostrophe:

Perhaps the problem in learning the possessive apostrophe convention thoroughly is that we tend to rush through it. Students learn about the singular possessive form in the elementary grades, and that concept is not terribly difficult. The problems come in when we start talking about words that happen to end in -s and plural possessives. The fact is, plural posses- sives are relatively rare. (The confusion over plural possessives is further complicated by the irregular plurals, which do not end in -s and so look like singular possessives.)

Matters are made more complicated because plural possessives are easily confused with singular entities that own plural items (Mary’s lambs.) Although it’s tempting to put all kinds of singular and plural combinations together and show where the apostrophes would go—or not go—in every permutation, doing so is not productive. We suggest that you spend more time on the concept of using an apostrophe to signify a possessive relationship between two nouns. Get your students truly grounded in this concept before worrying about those “after the -s” situations. Don’t put eggs in the basket of plural possessives when the basket for singular possessives is not filled.

Using a Noun as an Adjective:
Understanding Functional Shifting

The English language is flexible. Just as nouns can function as adjectives when they take the possessive form, any noun can actually function as an adjective under the right circumstances. The Noun Owner’s Manual says this:

Your NOUN may be easily converted into an adjective. All you have to do is put another NOUN after it and have them make sense together (COW pasture, for example).

That nouns can function as adjectives is something that your students have known unconsciously since they’ve been hearing and speaking English. So when you call this phenomenon functional shifting, make students aware that they are not learning anything new: what they are learning is what to call a feature of the English language that they’ve been using since they began been speaking English. Learning about functional shifting as such will not improve your students’ ability to use the English language. It will simply illuminate the way this language works.

Often, we need to change the form of a noun to get it to do the work of an adjective in a slightly different way. We may have to add an ending such as -y (greed is the noun, greedy is the adjective; water the noun, watery, the adjective) or -ous (traitor, traitorous; carnivore, carnivorous) or -ful (harm, harmful). A water tower is not the same as a watery tower.

Teaching Procedure

It’s fun (and informative) to make word chains that shift the function of nouns into that of adjectives. Begin with any noun:

Noun: card

Noun used as adjective: card table

Noun: table

Noun used as adjective: table top

Noun: top

Noun used as adjective: top dog

Noun: dog

Noun used as adjective: dog fight

Noun: fight

Noun used as adjective: fight club

Noun: club

Noun used as adjective: club soda

This kind of wordplay brings one pattern of the English language to the conscious level and will result in advancement for English language learners as well as native speakers. Any time students are actively engaged in fast-paced, social word profusions like this, they exercise their creative thinking muscles.

The Morphology of Nouns

How do we create a noun from a word that is another part of speech?

Nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs belong to the category of parts of speech that we call form class words. As we saw above, nouns easily hitch a ride on other nouns to perform adjective work. But in the English language, if other parts of speech want to do the work of nouns, they usually have to change their form. They can do this by adding what we call “noun-making suffixes” or, for younger students, “noun-making endings” or “nounmakers.” Your students have already been creating nouns out of other parts of speech by adding endings: They’ve been adding -er or -or to create nouns out of verbs: singer, actor. They’ve been using the -ing ending to create gerunds: I hope there will be no singing in the car; I’ve always wanted to try acting.

Form class words are also called open class words because the English language accepts new nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. And it isn’t uncommon that some nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs fade from use. However, pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions neither change their form by adding endings nor does the language gain or lose members of these parts of speech. They are called the structure class words.

However, there are lots of other noun-making suffixes that your students probably don’t use very often. If they did, not only would their vocabulary improve, but their thinking would enter the realm of the abstract. That is because these other noun-making suffixes are capable of naming abstract ideas:

Here is what we mean when we say that these noun-making suffixes are capable of naming ideas: Consider the difference between friend and friendship; free and freedom; light and lightness. Granted, not all such words bring us to an abstract level, but enough of them do to make it worthwhile to cultivate an awareness of noun-making suffixes.

Teaching Procedures

1.Take a look at your current vocabulary list or the glossary of a math, science, or social studies textbook. From this list, grab some verbs or adjectives and show students how to transform them into nouns by using the appropriate noun-making suffix.

2.Do the reverse: This time, have students go on safari through a vocabulary list or glossary, scouting out words that already have been transformed into nouns, using the noun-making suffixes. Help students “un-noun” these morphed nouns by restoring them to their original forms.

Noun Expansion

Your Noun Owner’s Manual further states:

You may add all kinds of modifiers before and after your NOUN. You may replace your NOUN along with its modifiers with a pronoun.

There are two ways to improve the nouns in a writing piece: The first is to hire a different noun, one that is more specific, more abstract, more unexpected, a better fit in terms of the register and tone that the writer wants. The other is to leave a given noun in place but build it up with a good “noun team.” By a noun team, we mean a noun plus its modifiers. Its modifiers may come before or after it. Its modifiers may be single words, such as adjectives; phrases, such as prepositional phrases; or clauses, such as adjective clauses. If you need a convenient name to call the structure that is formed when a noun and its modification structures form an entity, you can use the term nominal group. A nominal group, simply put, is a noun plus its modifiers, working together as a team.

Headword: In a noun phrase, the headword is the noun that is being modified. Modifiers may be added before or after the headword.

When you play Monopoly™, you can’t win unless you enrich the value of your property by building houses and hotels. If you want your students to enrich the value of the nouns in their writing, you can teach them to build “houses and hotels” on their “noun property.”

As explained in the sidebar, the “boss noun” of a noun phrase (or noun clause) is that which is being expanded with modifiers. But we don’t want students to just heap adjective upon adjective in front of the headword. That would be amateurish.We want students to learn to modify the headword on both sides, in the prenoun and the postnoun positions, like this:

a friend

a former friend

a former friend who broke my heart

a former friend who broke my heart in a million pieces

Nouns and the Writing Process

When you do a workout at the gym, you focus on specific muscle groups: chest, arms, legs, back, glutes, core. You need to have students focus on specific features of language when they revise. In many classrooms, teachers think they are employing the full writing process, but they are missing instruction in the revision stage. What passes for revision in many classrooms is, in fact, editing of surface errors, if that. One way to focus on revision is to have students consider how they have used nouns:

1.Are you being specific? One way to be specific is to use proper nouns. Could you include more proper nouns in your revision?

2.Do you have ideas as well as people, places, and things? Could you use more abstract words, especially in the beginning and at the end of your piece, to bring your piece to a higher level? (Use your nounmaking suffixes to create words that express ideas.)

Student writing is often skimpy. One of the biggest problems for students is that they don’t know how to expand their ideas. When you tell them to put some meat on the bones, they look at their scrawny paragraphs in despair, thinking they need to come up with whole new swaths of information (which they don’t have). Lacking that information, they merely repeat themselves. But many students who find themselves at a loss to “say more” can indeed say more within what they’ve already put on paper by looking at their existing nouns and thinking, If I hold a mental magnifying glass up to this noun, what else might I see?

Grammar-math connection: Think of the process of expanding a noun with modifiers and compounds as the breakdown of a mathematical expression into its prime factorization.

Teaching Procedures

1.Using picture books: Children as well as teenagers love to revisit their favorite picture books from their prereading days. Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day? is a welcome sight, with its bustling towns (Scarry, 1968). Using this or any photograph, painting, or cartoon of an active scene, have students magnify a noun by adding modifiers and compounds.

2.Using authentic language: Help students notice how professional writers have chosen to expand their noun phrases. As you read literature with them, stop occasionally to display sentences that exemplify expanded noun phrases. Connect this activity to the writing process by having students expand their own noun phrases, write them on the board, and analyze them.

Introduction to the Functions of Nominal Groups

Now that we think of nouns, nouns plus their modifiers, and pronouns under the umbrella term nominal group, we can talk about the functions of single nouns and pronouns as well as nominal groups in a sentence. A sentence may be represented as a series of slots. The slots are to be filled by words in a kind of paint-by-number system. Obviously, there is at least one noun slot in every sentence, because every sentence has a subject slot, and that subject slot must be filled by a nominal group.

These are the jobs that nominal groups can take in a sentence:

Required for all sentences:

Subject

Required for some sentences:

Direct object (required only for transitive verbs)

Indirect object (required only when a direct object is present and the verb has to do with giving or showing)

Object complement (required only for verbs that have to do with delegating or choosing)

Always optional:

Object of a preposition (required for prepositional phrases, which not all sentences have)

Appositive (not required, but used to relabel the nominal group that precedes it)

Predicate noun (one of the ways to complete a sentence that has a linking verb)

Modifier (a noun that acts as an adjective when it is placed before another noun)

You may find this too much information to give your students, but it can be useful and the time you spend teaching it may eventually pay off in a higher level of conversation that you and your students can have about language. If you do decide to teach about noun functions, animate the process.

Teaching Procedure: Understand Nominal Functions

Have students tell a story, using the same nominal group in various positions in the sentences. It might go like this:

Once upon a time there was a prince (predicate noun). This prince (subject) was lonely. His mother, the queen, decided to find him (indirect object) a friend. She left the castle in search of just the right friend for the prince, her beloved son (object of preposition).

In this activity, students have to think not only about grammar, but also about vocabulary: There are any number of ways to express the same referent, in this case, the prince. Reading comprehension is sometimes impeded because the reader does not connect a pronoun to its proper referent. Or the reader gets confused by a long and complex nominal group, the kind that is often found in literary text. An activity such as this can strengthen a reader’s ability to see that the writer has chosen multiple ways of referring to one person, place, thing, or abstraction.

Teaching about Pronouns

It’s hard to talk about nouns without immediately talking about pronouns because nouns (along with their modifiers) and pronouns perform the same functions in a sentence. The traditional definition of a pronoun as a word that replaces a noun does not tell the whole story of the ingenious work of pronouns. In fact, you can delineate the borders of a nominal group based on the words that get replaced by a pronoun. In the previous example, the nominal group a former friend who broke my heart in a million pieces is replaceable by the pronoun he or she. Even if this nominal group were bigger than that—say it were a former foreign friend with flashy fingers who broke my heart into a million pieces and then stomped on every piece with high heels—that entire nominal group would be replaced by the single pronoun he or she.

Your students’ use of pronouns comes naturally. They don’t need a pencil and paper to figure out what words are replaced by a pronoun. Help your students bring their unconscious knowledge about pronouns to the conscious level: They know that a pronoun, contrary to what the grammar book says, does not simply “replace a noun.” What a pronoun replaces, in fact, is the entire nominal group—the noun plus all its modifiers, even if those modifiers are whole clauses, even if those modifiers fall on the postnoun side.

When it comes to teaching pronouns, asking students to pick out pronouns on worksheets goes about it all wrong: It’s not a matter of getting students to identify pronouns. Given a list of pronouns, anyone can identify them. The list of pronouns is finite. You might as well give students a list of words that begin and end with the same letter and ask them to identify them. But your students’ intuition (we’re talking only about fluent speakers of English now) about how to use pronouns, an intuition developed when they were toddlers, can reveal to them an astonishing amount that they already know, and can use, about grammar.

Here’s why: A pronoun replaces all the words that act together to satisfy a noun slot in a sentence. If your students want to know what the subject of a sentence is—where the subject begins and ends—just using a pronoun will tell them “who or what” the sentence is about. The pronoun will instantly gobble up the entire subject (or the entire direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, etc.) The same holds for any noun function (aka nominal group) anywhere in the sentence, as shown below:

A girl went to the zoo.

We could obviously replace a girl with she and the zoo with it.

We could load up those nouns with all kinds of modifiers, before and after, and the same pronouns would still gobble them up:

A fancy little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead went to the zoo with the strangest animals in all the world.

A fancy little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead is still she, and the zoo with the strangest animals in all the world is still it. And let’s notice that we added more noun structures that live within the expanded noun slot. Those noun structures, like all noun structures, can be replaced by a pronoun. Interestingly enough, if the next sentence were to begin with It, we would know that It refers to the zoo, and not the world, its nearest noun phrase.

The noun structure can include a whole clause:

A girl I know went to the zoo.

Here, what the pronoun she would replace—a girl I know—consists of a determiner and its noun (a girl) plus something else: an adjective clause, one that answers the question which girl? But it’s the whole entire thing that is the noun structure replaced by she. The amazing thing is that we learn to use pronouns as toddlers. There’s something going on in our brains that allows us to group nouns together with very sophisticated modifiers both before and after and consider the whole structure as a unit, a unit replaceable by a single pronoun!

All pronouns stand for something, and understanding what they stand for is key to comprehension, whether we are receiving information aurally or through text. Conversely, as writers and speakers, whenever we use a pronoun, we need to be sure that the audience understands that pronoun’s referent.

The pronoun replacement test to identify all the words in a noun structure works even for abstract concepts, gerunds, and noun clauses:

Beauty (replaceable by it) is in the eye of the beholder. (abstract concept)

My favorite pastime is sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time (replaceable by it). (gerund phrases)

That you have been late three times this week (replaceable by it) has not gone unnoticed. (noun clause filling the subject slot)

I or Me?

When there’s only one pronoun in the nominal group slot, students don’t have a problem knowing which case to use. But, for some reason, many students do have a problem when there’s a compound pronoun structure:

* Can Judi and me borrow some money?

* between you and I

* If you have any questions, see Joe or I.

Any of the speakers of the above examples would say:

Can I borrow some money?

Between us

If you have any questions, see me.

The old rule that you may have learned is still in effect: Simply take the other party out of the compound and go with the pronoun that comes naturally when there’s only one pronoun left. There’s a home remedy called the “pencil test,” meaning that you cover up one of the pronouns to see how the remaining one sounds. That works just as well as anything.

Of course, you could, if you wanted to spend a lot of time, teach pronoun case by explaining that subjects and predicate nouns take the subjective case and that direct objects, indirect objects, and objects of prepositions take the objective case. We think it’s good to teach the quick-and-easy way (taking “the other one” out) as a habit of mind. But we also think it’s a good idea to give students a systematic way of understanding how pronouns work when they are ready to learn it. They may be ready to learn it when they are learning a second language, because learning a second language in a classroom requires the use of grammatical terminology, as you’ve probably discovered.

You can give students practice in the “take the other one out” technique as you run across compound pronoun structures in your in-class readings. You can also ask students to look for these in their own readings and to flag them. Give them editorials and texts of speeches, noting how pronoun case is chosen in carefully edited English.

As you listen to your students, note their patterns: Surely, they don’t go around talking like the Cookie Monster (Me want cookie!). Which pronouns do they use in a nonstandard manner? Those are the ones that you need to notice and teach: Are they using me for I? pluralizing you? Saying her and I?

Teaching Procedure: Clarify Your Pronouns

Students need to practice supplying the sensible pronoun when more than one pronoun is in the slot. To do this, all they really need to do is add another person to any story. As you listen to the social conversations of your students, you’ll find that they spend many of their waking hours telling and listening to stories. Their stories are usually about events that they found funny or infuriating. Their stories are loaded with pronouns.

Ask your students to write one of their stories as an anecdote. You want them to use an informal tone—just get the story down on paper. If the story can be told in about two hundred words, that would be sufficient. Then, have students exchange their stories and rewrite them, adding another character, who will be represented by a pronoun. If all goes well, they will find themselves composing many sentences that call for either a subjective or objective case pronoun. They will also have to adjust the verb to reestablish subject-verb agreement because they will be going from a singular to a plural subject. This will be a natural way to supply the right pronoun in context.

A variation is to have students inject themselves into an existing narrative that is written in the third person. Take any work of fiction the students are reading and have them locate several sentences that refer to the main character by name. Then have them rewrite those sentences, adding themselves as though they are part of the story. They will have to decide whether to use I or me. This is how it would work with sentences taken from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. We’ve put the added conjunction/pronoun structure in parentheses:

♦Tom (and I) arrived at home in a dreary mood, and the first thing his aunt said to him (and me) showed him (and me) that he (and I) had brought his sorrows to an unpromising market.

♦Tom Sawyer (and I) stepped in at the door and caught a glimpse of the picture.

♦Tom (and I) went to bed that night planning vengeance against Alfred Temple.

What you want students to discover is the pattern of matching I to he, me to him. The pronoun system is a kind of replacement set. In algebra, students learn that a replacement set is the set of all values that can play the role of X. A replacement set is like a team: Team members can substitute for one another. The members of the set (team) of subjective case pronouns can each substitute for the other in a given slot in a sentence, just as the members of the set (team) of objective case pronouns can take each other’s places in a given slot.

The possessive case pronouns also constitute a replacement set. This concept is responsible for the bemusing fact that the possessive pronoun its has no apostrophe: If you consider its as a member of the possessive case team, and not as a free agent, you understand why it takes no apostrophe. After all, the other members of the possessive pronoun team that are eligible to replace its don’t go around wearing apostrophes: In the phrase the cat that chased its tail, you could replace its with his. No apostrophes all around. (Anyway, it’s can be broken down into it is or it has.)

Once students conceive of the pronoun cases—subjective, objective, possessive—as replacement sets, or teams, they can figure out the sensible pronoun simply by plugging in any other pronoun. Guaranteed, there will be a pronoun on the team that sounds right in the sentence. Once students figure out, through intuition, what team is playing in the slot, they can pick out the right pronoun from the set.

It is, of course, never correct to mix the members of the team in the same slot. Thus, it would never be correct to say *her and I or *him or I. Again, we’ll use the logic of math: When you have and, it means you are adding. When you have or, it means you are subtracting or replacing. You can only add, subtract, or replace like terms. She and I = we; him and me= us. But *her and I cannot equal either we or us because *her and I, being unlike things, cannot be added.

Teaching Procedure: Understand Pronoun Case

To get students to understand the concept of pronoun cases as replacement sets, use the metaphor of teams. Students can draw a picture of any team sport in progress—baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey, football. Have them dress their players in contrasting uniform colors. On each uniform, they write either an S (subjective case) or O (objective case). Instead of player numbers, the players wear their pronouns: I, we, he, she, they, who (they play for the Subjectives); me, us, him, her, them, whom play for the Objectives. (Because the second person pronouns are the same for both cases, and the same for singular and plural, we’ll leave them on the bench.)

If you want to get students up on their feet, you can set up the two pronoun teams with students themselves as the players and conduct any kind of competition.

Additional Pronoun Problems

The most common and noticeable pronoun problem is arguably the placement of an objective case pronoun in a slot that should be filled by a subjective case pronoun (as in me for I). Although the reverse (the placement of a subjective case pronoun in a slot that should be filled by an objective case pronoun) happens, it is not viewed with nearly the same disdain. The use of me for I as a subject is a very famous, well-advertised, much-corrected grammatical error. It is so well-known and feared, in fact, that the fear of committing it is what leads to the overuse of I (and other subjective case pronouns) where me is actually the appropriate choice.

Once you’ve solved the I vs. me problem, you can address a few other pronoun problems that are less noticeable:

♦which vs. that: Use which to introduce optional information, that to introduce necessary information.

♦we girls vs. us girls (insertion of a noun after the pronoun): If you take the noun out, you’ll hear the correct pronoun.

♦who/whom vs. which/that: Refer to a person (or animal, especially pets) as who/whom.

♦who vs. whom: Ask yourself if you would use he or him to replace the word in question. He corresponds with who; him corresponds with whom. So if the sentence is Who/whom is knocking at the door? you would answer He is knocking at the door. Therefore, who would be the correct pronoun. If the sentence is Who/whom do you trust? you would answer I trust him, so you know that whom is the correct pronoun.

♦The everybody dilemma: It used to be taught that because everybody (everyone, somebody, someone) is singular, it must be matched with he or him, as the singular generic pronoun. However, today that rule is obsolete, condemned as sexist language. One solution is to simply recast the sentence as plural, dissolving the problem: Change everybody to all people and match it with they/ them. Or go with the flow of language change, yield to common (and sensible) usage, and declare the existence of the “singular they/them.” Before you faint in horror, remember that language is a changing, flexible social contract that responds to common use among a majority of respectable folks. Time was, the pronoun you was used only as a plural, the singular being the thee/thou/ thy form for informal address. A little after the time of Shakespeare, the thee/thou/thy form gradually fell out of use, leaving you to serve as both singular and plural, formal and informal. Similarly, doth and hath, to the chagrin of pedants, gave way to does and has. The English language survived and flourished anyway. Despite your most impassioned protestations, it will survive and flourish as we recognize that they/them may be used as a singular pronoun to match with everybody, everyone, et. al.

Pronouns and Reading Comprehension

Earlier, we mentioned that the reader (or, for that matter, the listener) has to connect pronouns to the nominal groups to which they refer (their referents). In simple text, the pronoun will lie close to the referent, making the connection obvious. In simple text, the referent will consist of a single noun or a simple adjective-noun phrase. But in complex text, there may be all kinds of intervening structures between the pronoun and its referent. In complex text, the referent may be a lengthy and complex nominal group within the same sentence as the pronoun. The referent may even be the concept encapsulated in another, previous sentence or even a whole preceding paragraph. Many sentences, even sentences that begin paragraphs, open with a pronoun, particularly It or This. When a sentence or paragraph begins with a pronoun, the reader has to create the link.

Therefore, one habit of successful readers is to stop the flow of reading when the pronouns aren’t making sense. Successful readers go back and create the link between the pronouns and what they stand for (their referents). Think of the referent as the entity—whether it is a single word, phrase, clause, or group of sentences—that the pronoun encapsulates.

Another way that pronoun issues can get in the way of comprehension occurs when more than one person of the same sex is being talked about. We’ve all read dialogues that have confused us because we didn’t know which “he” was who!

You can even use your students’ ability to supply pronouns in a cloze passage to assess their reading comprehension (Dorn, Lyons, & Soffos, 2005, 56). If students cannot supply missing pronouns, that is a good indicator that they are unable to group nouns and make proper associations within the sentence. To create a formative assessment in reading comprehension, take some or all of the pronouns out of a passage that you expect students to comprehend and ask them to fill in. If they can’t do that, then the reading passage may be above their heads.

Pronouns, because they refer to entities the reader is supposed to know about, play an important role in the reader’s orientation. By consolidating entities, pronouns act as a kind of back-stitching, helping the reader keep one foot on the ground (familiar information) while stepping forward into new information. (For those of you not familiar with the needle arts, back- stitching allows the threads to knot even as the sewing moves forward, creating a strong bond between the stitches.)

Adjective Recognition and the Properties of Adjectives

The traditional definition of an adjective is that it is a word that modifies (or describes) a noun; the traditional definition of an adverb is that it is a word that modifies (or describes) a verb, adjective, or other adverb. True though these definitions are, they might not be the best, and certainly should not be the only, way that students can be taught to recognize adjectives and adverbs (see Figure 4.2).

We like to teach students to identify adjectives based on the questions that they answer: What kind? Which one? How many?

It may help to know that the Latin root of the word adjective is ject, meaning “to throw.” And the word begins with the combining form ad, meaning “in the direction of, toward, at.” So the word itself reveals that an adjective is a word (or words) thrown at a noun. Because students are already familiar with other words having these word parts (eject, reject, inject, subject; adventure, advantage, adapt, adopt), the etymological connection may lead them to a durable understanding of what adjectives are all about.

Figure 4.2

Adjective: Owner’s Manual

Congratulations on your wise purchase of an ADJECTIVE. Your ADJECTIVE may be used to fit into one of the following frames:

The __________ truck. or The truck was very __________.

Your ADJECTIVE likes to answer the question What kind?

If your ADJECTIVE doesn’t fit into either of these frames, maybe it is the kind of ADJECTIVE that answers the questions Which one? or How many?

Your ADJECTIVE may be capable of using the suffixes -er in the comparative form and -est in the superlative form. (If your ADJECTIVE doesn’t like these suffixes, just use more and most to accomplish comparison or superiority.)

Your ADJECTIVE reports to your NOUN, and your NOUN can easily become an ADJECTIVE to another NOUN.

Often, groups of words decide to get together and do ADJECTIVE-like work. Such groups of words are called ADJECTIVALS, and they may be phrases or clauses that operate just like ADJECTIVES, answering those questions that ADJECTIVES answer.

Your Adjective Owner’s Manual displays the essential information about adjectives: the frames that they fit in, the jobs that they are capable of doing, the different kinds, their ability to express comparative or superlative degree, the fact that the adjective is an underling of a noun, the way adjectives team up to become what we call adjectivals.

Teaching Procedure: Understanding Basic Information about Adjectives Using the Owner’s Manual

Because students aren’t going to retain much about adjectives by staring at the Owner’s Manual, we suggest that you give students a bunch of words to handle and have them pull out which ones appear to be adjectives. Then, have students take a closer look at the words determined to be adjectives.

Where might you get your hands on this bunch of words we’re talking about? If you have the time and inclination, you can cut individual words out of magazines or newspapers and laminate them for easy handling and durability. About a hundred words will supply a class of students working cooperatively, but if you have the patience to gather more, you can always use them.

As we’ve noted, any noun can function as an adjective (fruit truck). However, a noun will not fit into the frame *The truck was very fruit. To determine whether a word should be considered an adjective for the purpose of this activity, students should test the word in both frames.

The first step is to have the students use the frames on their Owner’s Manual to separate out the adjectives from the nonadjectives.

Once they have a stack of words they determine to be adjectives, students can consider what kinds of adjectives they are, based on the questions that they answer. They should place the adjectives in three separate piles: What kind? Which one? How many?

The adjectives that tell what kind? may be further divided into those that form the comparative and superlative forms by adding the suffix -er or -est and those that use the words more or most to express comparative or superlative degree. Then, there may be irregular adjectives, ones like good (better, best) and bad (worse, worst). The idea is for the students to recognize patterns and irregularities: Let them find a governing rule that determines whether an adjective accepts the -er/-est suffix or whether it takes the more/most form. Allow them the discovery that comes with observation and inductive reasoning.

Now, have students examine the other adjectives. Those that answer how many? are obviously numbers. But many of those that answer which one? are both adjectives and pronouns. We have the demonstrative pronouns: this, that, these, those (all of which can function with or without a noun after them). We have possessive case pronouns: my, our, your, his, her, its, their. And although you can say my truck, no native speaker of English would

say *The truck is very my.

We’re clarifying the difference between the three kinds of adjectives because if your background is in traditional, rather than linguistic grammar, you may not have been exposed to the distinction. The distinction is that attributive adjectives—those that answer what kind?—are members of the form class, along with nouns, verbs, and adverbs. The adjectives that answer which one? and how many? are members of the structure class, along with pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. Linguists refer to such adjectives as noun determiners or noun markers because they signal the arrival of a noun. Articles—a, an, the—are the most famous noun determiners.

The Morphology of Adjectives

Certain kinds of suffixes create adjectives out of nouns or verbs. The most common are -y, -ish, -acious, -atious, -ate, -al, -ile, and -ic. While the first two on this list are used in casual speech and are likely to be very familiar to students, the others are more academic-ish. To blend grammar with vocabulary learning, have students amble through their content area textbooks (science, math, social studies) on safari for words that have been made into adjectives through these suffixes.

You’ll note the only adjectives that fit into the frames are those that answer what kind? Those that answer which one? or how many? are adjectives in a different class. They are adjectives that do not accept suffixes and cannot be conceived of in a comparative or superlative way. The word three, for example, is an adjective in that it answers the question how many? The word third is an adjective in that it answers the question which one? However, these adjectives are different from adjectives such as green or fluffy in that they cannot be comparative or superlative: There’s no such thing as being *more three or *thirder than something else. And, although we could say the third truckand even The truck was third, we would never say *The truck was thirder.

Adjectives and Usage

A well-known usage issue that pertains to adjectives is that it is an adjectival form—and not the adverbial form—of a word that fills the slot of the subject complement. What this means is that after a linking verb, we use the adjectival form. Hence:

I feel good.

This soup tastes spicy.

The stove felt hot.

The music sounded fuzzy.

It always pays to be honest.

The changes in modifiers below show the differences between adverbs and subject complements:

I feel good. I exercise regularly.

This soup tastes spicy. The cook must have sprinkled hot peppers generously on it.

The stove felt hot. Someone must have been cooking on it recently.

The music sounded fuzzy. We could not hear the lyrics clearly.

In a most confusing manner, the word well has two closely-related meanings. It can mean in good health or it can be the adverbial form of good. Thus, if you feel in good health, you may declare that you feel good or well with equal grammatical confidence.

Although we often hear folks say that they feel badly about a sad event, that expression actually does betray the rule: Because the verb feel is a linking verb when we use it in this context, the rule calls for the adjective bad, not the adverb badly. Good and well would be the replacement set for bad and badly. A good mnemonic is the West Side Story song “I Feel Pretty,” which is perfectly good English. Because she is using a linking verb, feel, Maria does not say *”I Feel Prettily.” Grammatically, I feel pretty is following the same pattern as I feel bad.

Adjectives and the Writing Process

How can students put their knowledge about modifiers to use in the writing process?

We want students to be critical, creative, and clever thinkers. These are some questions they can ask themselves as they revise and clean up their own writing:

1.Is this modifier necessary?

2.Is this modifier attracting just the right amount of attention from the reader?

3.Is this modifier behaving itself? That is, is it punctuated correctly and placed correctly? Both of these questions are about the clarity of the sentence as it is read.

4.Should any modifiers be added?

We’ll talk about the role played by adjective clauses in Part Two.

Conclusion

The traditional definitions of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns are only starting points. While it is easy to get students to recite definitions, we need to bring out understandings of these word classes. Nouns act as magnets for modifiers, which can be placed either before or after the noun being modified (headword). The entire noun structure—the headword with all the modifiers that stick to it—is what is replaced by a pronoun (contrary to the traditional definition that a pronoun “replaces a noun”). We use the term nominal group for the entity that consists of the headword and its modifiers. A nominal group fits into any of the following several slots in a sentence. All sentences have at least one single noun, nominal group, or pronoun to act as the subject. Beyond that, transitive verbs take a direct object. Transitive verbs that are about giving and showing can take an indirect object. If the clause has a linking verb, the subject complement may be a noun (nominal group or pronoun). In addition, prepositional phrases link nouns (or the whole nominal group or pronoun) to other parts of the sentence, and that is what we mean by the object of a preposition. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives can slip into each other’s functions. The information in this chapter can help students become better writers and even better readers if we nestle the grammar lessons into the writing process and include them in strategies for reading comprehension of complex text.