We briefly covered parts of speech last year during our series on the TOEIC test. Today, we're going to go into more detail. We'll look at a few helpful infographics, and do a few exercises to practice.
You will run into many new words during your ESL studies. Often you won't know what they mean, but if you know what part of speech they are, it will be easier for you to do ESL tests like TOEIC or guess their meaning.
The best way to find out if a word is a noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, verb, etc, is to look at the suffix. The suffix is the last two, three, or four letters of a word.
Nouns
- tion (pollution) -ance (performance)
-or (doctor) -y (beauty)
-sion (explosion) -ence (diligence)
-ist (dentist) -ar (dollar)
-tion (detention) -hood (neighbourhood) -ment (movement)
-acy (legacy) -ness (happiness)
-age (carriage) -ism (journalism) -ity (capacity)
This applies only to common nouns. Proper nouns like names of countries (Canada), people (Jason), companies (Apple), etc, you can't use the suffix to guess their meaning. However, proper nouns always start with capital letters.
Adjectives
Adjectives are used to describe (talk about) nouns: a wonderful day, a crazy idea, etc.
-al (hysterical) -like (childlike) -ate (irate)
-ful (beautiful) -ous (joyous) -ing (interesting)
-ly (friendly) -y (chatty) -ed (interested)
-ic (heroic) -able (capable) -ive (positive)
-ish (childish) -ible (terrible) -ent (confident)
Verbs are action words and have many different endings. However, there are common verb suffixes.
-ate (communicate)
-ify (qualify)
-en (soften)
-ise/ize (realise/realize)
(ise is British English, ize is American English)
Adverbs
Adverbs describe (talk about) actions. They usually are made by changing the suffix of an adjective, but can also come from prepositions.
-ly (commonly)
-ily (happily) with adjectives ending in "y"
-wards (backwards) prepositional adverb
-wise (clockwise) adverb noun
Now a little something on...
Word Order
There are suffixes that be used on more than one type of word. For example, there are adjectives and verbs that end in ing. In this case, it's important to remember word order and word pairings. Read the sentence below.
Mark likes reading comic books because the stories are exciting.
Verbs often come after words such as "like", "to" "for", and nouns. Adjectives come after any form of the verb be, and before nouns. They can also be at the end of a sentence.
Advice
Think of suffixes, word endings, as guidelines. There are many exceptions for the rules. So, remember to think of word order and suffixes together.
Exercise
Read the passage below. Then, using the guidelines above, put the words under the correct headings. You can use the comments section or a piece of paper. Also feel free to email me at
jlbteaching@gmail.com
Image Comics is a smaller, independent comic book company based in Berkley, California. It was founded in 1992 by Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Wilce Portacio, Jim Valentino, Erik Larsen, and Mark Silvestri. All bitterly left Marvel at the height of their careers.
The seven creators started Image because they were extraordinarily frustrated with their employer, Marvel Comics. They all had made a tremendous impact on the sales of Marvel titles, but felt they weren't being recognised for their work.
First, they mainly put out superhero books, but Image Comics now publishes an eclectic range of comic book series. Image doesn't have a massive market share, but its comics are still very popular with many comic book fans.
Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs
company left smaller bitterly
Finally two videos from the good teachers at Engvid.
Parts Of Speech
Sentence Structure
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