What are idioms and proverbs?
Idioms are phrases and sentences that do not mean exactly what they say. Even if you know the meaning of every word in the see or hear, you may not understand the idiom because you don't understand the culture behind it. Proverbs are wise sayings that help teach lessons.
Click here to see a list of English idioms and proverbs - and their usage and meaning:
http://www.eslcafe.com/idioms/
Now, test your knowledge of English idioms and proverbs:
http://www.idiomconnection.com/
Visit www.englishforum.com/00/students/
Reading comprehension
Without a strong background in basic skills like decoding and vocabulary-building, comprehension is impossible. Michael Pressley (2000) offers research-based strategies for building on these and other skills to increase student understanding of what is read. Go to www.readingrockets.org/article/68 for full helpful details.
Word classes in English
Words are fundamental units in every sentence, so we will begin by looking at these. Consider the words in the following sentence:
my brother drives a big car
We can tell almost instinctively that brother and car are the same type of word, and also that brother and drives are different types of words. By this we mean that brother and car belong to the same word class. Similarly, when we recognise that brother and drives are different types, we mean that they belong to different word classes. We recognise seven MAJOR word classes… Click here for full details:
www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/wordclas/wordclas.htm
www.wordpower.ws/grammar/gramdex.html
Tense and Aspect in English
The English verbs are inflected for two tenses: present (walk(s)) and past (walked). In other words, tense is indicated by morphological marking: zero/-s for present tense and -ed for regular past tense. Tense is not necessarily straightforwardly related to what TIME the event represented by the verb takes place. For instance, the simple present tense can be used to refer to various times, as it is used for… Full details are available at these sites:
www.helsinki.fi/~mpalande/meaning_of_tense_and_aspect.html
www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rthompso/tenseaspect.html
www.rickharrison.com/language/aspect.html
www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/verbs/tense.htm
Stative and Dynamic verbs in English
What's the difference between stative and dynamic verbs? A stative verb is one which asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property (possibly in relation to its other arguments). Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; they have no duration and no distinguished endpoint. Verbs which are not stative are often called dynamic verbs. Learn more from these authorities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stative_verb
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/progressive.htm
www.aubg.bg/cs100/verbs.htm
Case in English
As in Latin, so in English "case" refers to a change in the form of a word which indicates how that word is used in a sentence, that is, how it relates syntactically to other words in the sentence. In English, the only words that are marked formally are pronouns and the "declension" of pronouns shows three cases: The subject case, the object case, and the possessive case. Examples: "I, me, my/mine" and "he, him, his." Other words distinguish their syntactic usage within a sentence by their word position. Examples: "Man bites Dog" and "Henry gave Sam Mary."
There's more information here:
http://omega.cohums.ohio-state.edu/latin/grammar/english_cases.htm
www.englishforums.com/English/GrammaticalCasesEnglishLanguage/bppdn/Post.htm
Nouns and number in English
Nouns enable us to name things that exist in the world. The familiar traditional definition of a noun is "a naming word": it refers to a thing, a person, or a substance. This is a good starting point. There are more precise ways of defining nouns… Search further here:
http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz/resources/resources/exp_lang/nouns.html
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~cram/iss30/jooken.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural
Agreement (or, Concord) in English
It is usually pretty easy to match the verb with the subject in English. Only in the present tense does the verb have more than one form. And except for one verb, only the third person singular is different. Besides, the third person singular present tense always ends in an s. We understand this most of the time.
Really, do we? Know more at:
http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000026.htm
http://aliscot.com/bigdog/agreement_sv.htm
www.buowl.boun.edu.tr/students/grammar/writing%20guides/SUBJECT%20VERB%20AGREEMENT.htm
Morphemes (Morphology) of English
The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs… For more on the subject, go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme
www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/morphemes.html
www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling001/morphology2.html
Phrase types in English
In grammar, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence.
For example the house at the end of the street (example 1) is a phrase. It acts like a noun. It contains the phrase at the end of the street (example 2), a prepositional phrase which acts like an adjective. Example 2 could be replaced by white, to make the phrase the white house.
Examples 1 and 2 contain the phrase the end of the street (example 3) which acts like a noun. It could be replaced by the cross-roads to give the house at the cross-roads. Most phrases have a head or central word which defines the type of phrase. In English the head is often the first word of the phrase. Some phrases, however, can be headless…
Look at these sites for fuller information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrase
www.factoryschool.org/handbook/sentences/TypesOfPhrases.html
Clause types in English
In grammar, a clause is a word or group of words ordinarily consisting of a subject and a predicate, although in some languages and some types of clauses, the subject may not appear explicitly. (This is especially common in null subject languages.) The most basic kind of sentence consists of a single clause; more complicated sentences may contain multiple clauses. Indeed, it is possible for one clause to contain another.
Clauses are often contrasted with phrases…
Continue at these invaluable sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clause
http://esl.about.com/od/intermediatewriting/a/sentence_types.htm
www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/clauses/subtype.htm
Sentence types in English
This section describes how the parts of speech are combined to create English sentences…
We recommend a tour of these useful links:
www.shared-visions.com/explore/english/sentence.html
www.scientificpsychic.com/grammar/enggram2.html
http://wps.prenhall.com/hss_fulwiler_pocketref_2/0,9716,1624410--1624645,00.html
|
|
