How to use Noun Phrase in my classroom?

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For my teaching in a primary school, it is very difficult for the students to learn more about noun, types of nouns and functions of nouns. The students cannot remember all of them. Sometimes they do not know what different between each words in a sentence. I have many steps of my teaching about nouns to make my students understand and remember easily. First of all, teach the students pronounce the words correctly by repeating again and again. When they can pronounce the words they also know and understand the meaning of the words too. Second, let the students practice how to spell the words by writing or dictation. After that teach them use the words write the sentences. The sentences they write must not be the complex sentences but they are easy or simple sentences. Next, I always teach my students about countable nouns and uncountable nouns in order to let them know how to use the articles: a, and, the, or the different determiners. Then tell them about singular or plural words, I also explain them how to use verbs with each singular nouns or plural nouns when they write the sentences, too. It is very difficult to make the students understand and remember how to use the articles relate with singular nouns and plural nouns and also with verbs. For example: "The children go to school." Some of the students understand that "children" is singular noun so they write a wrong sentence as "The children goes to school." but some of them know that it is plural noun so they write a sentence correctly.

During teaching how to use the article with nouns, I also teach the students about the proper nouns because I want them to know and use the correct article "the" with the proper nouns. Not all of the proper nouns can use with article "the" but some of them can use article and some cannot. Sometimes the students forget what is proper noun or common noun so I try to let them practice the words as many ways as I can.The ways I teach my students how to practice the words are using activities, games, worksheet and also assignments.               The next step is teaching the students know how to use nouns with the other types of words especially with the adjective. It is very difficult to explain to the students to understand how to use adjectives with nouns. The adjectives always go before nouns and also describe or identify the nouns. But for my students they always forget how to place the adjectives. They sometimes put the adjectives after the nouns. Sometimes they do not know what word is adjective or not so they often use the wrong word. The way to solve this problem is try to train the students practice by giving them many exercises such as the exercise about noun phrase which use adjective, for example: the red car, a big green tree, etc.               It is very difficult to explain the rules of nouns phrases for the students to understand clearly all of the nouns phrases or how to know what nouns phrases are. Normally for Thai students, they are easy to forget the rules of language because they do not use foreign language in their daily life but only in the English class or do the examination or have the

competition that they must use English or other language. So they do not attend to study or remember foreign language like English.               The important thing for the students is how to remember the words so they must like to speak, read and write the words or sentences and sometimes sing the songs. They just do that every day like their routine not only in the English period they learn but they can do in the free time. In my opinion, the last thing that the English teacher must do is how to make the students feel good or comfortable with the good atmosphere in learning English and love to learn English with their pleasure and have happiness, too.

ReferencesArnold Zwicky. "Starting out on the wrong foot". Language Log. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=75. Retrieved 2008-11-01. Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary.Heather Macfadyen. University of Ottawa Canada' University. www.aets.uottawa.caHeather Marie Kosur. The grammatical Noun Phrase Modifier in English. 2009 "Term: Noun Phrases". UsingEnglish.com http://www.usingenglish.com/grossary/noun-phrase.html. Retrieved 2008-11-01.The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Third Edition. Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Miffin Company. All right reserved.http://www.brighthub.com/education/language/articles/32754.http://ict.moph.go.th/English/content/noun01.htmhttp://www.iscribe.org/english/noun.htmlhttp://www.towson.edu/ows/noun.htm

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TeachingEnglish

The noun phrase

Submitted by admin on 2 May, 2005 - 12:00

For too long now the verb phrase has been the dominant focus of attention in course books, syllabuses, and teacher training programmes.

Any teacher worth his/her salt will be able to tell you everything there is to know about base verbs, infinitives, progressives, perfectives, passives, and modals.

But, please, let's not forget the noun phrase! Why? Because the noun phrase is a quintessential part of every sentence (even if it doesn't appear in the surface structure of a sentence as in "stop!"), it is potentially infinite in length, and it can include any number of other phrases (e.g. noun, adjective, adverb) within its structure.

What is a noun phrase?

The structure of noun phrases

Noun phrases in class

Conclusion

What is a noun phrase?

Before we go any further, let's remind ourselves of what a noun phrase is. My definition is:

A noun phrase is either a pronoun or any group of words that can be replaced by a pronoun. For example, 'they', 'cars', and 'the cars' are noun phrases, but 'car' is just a noun, as you can see in these sentences (in which the noun phrases are all in bold)

Q: Do you like cars?

A: Yes, I like them.

Q: Do you like the cars over there?

A: Yes, they are nice.

Q: Do you like the car I bought last week?

A: Yes, I like it. (Note: 'It' refers to 'the car', not 'car')

If you are a little puzzled at this point, try and think of some further examples of noun phrases using the definition above, and compare your examples with simple nouns.

The structure of noun phrases

As I said, noun phrases can be infinite in length, but they would sound absurd if they got too long. So let's take the following noun phrase as our working model:

"The very tall education consultant with the roving eye"

The structure of this noun phrase contains three sections:

Pre-modification

The =determiner

very =adverb (intensifying)

tall = adjective

education = pre-modifying noun

Head noun

consultant

Post-modification

with the roving eye = preposition phrase

Of course, each and every part of the noun phrase can be changed, but here is a summary of some fundamental changes in which it could changed:

A relative clause could replace the preposition phrase. 'The man with the hat' becomes 'The man who is wearing the hat'.

There could be a string of adjectives (and pre-modifying nouns) instead of just one. Both of these systems have their own structural rules. 'The big brown wooden box.' Or 'The world cup football competition.'

A numeral or cardinal could be inserted after the determiner. 'Do you remember the time I bumped into you in the park?' can become 'Do you remember the first time I bumped into you in the park?'

There can be 'embedding' (e.g. 'the roving eye' is also a noun phrase and can be made more complex in the same way as 'the…consultant'!) 'The roving eye which he had cultivated for so many years'.

Any part of the noun phrase can simply be stripped away (apart from the word 'The' here, as 'consultant' is not a noun phrase in itself). So 'The very tall education consultant with the roving eye' can become 'The tall education consultant with the roving eye' (here 'very' has been deleted).

To sum up, noun phrases are very simple ideas in themselves, but they can be extremely complex in how they manifest themselves in actual language.

Noun phrases in class

But how can a teacher help students use noun phrases in a more accurate way? And how can a teacher help students to use them in a way that is more appropriate to the register of the target discourse? I have four suggestions to make, all of which I constantly use with my students:

I encourage students to understand what a noun phrase is.

To reinforce this understanding, I ask my students to study texts and answer such questions as "What pronoun could this noun phrase be replaced by?" and "What noun phrase does this pronoun refer to?"

I provide interesting prompts to encourage students to use noun phrases.

For example, I sometimes show my students a picture of a boy with brown eyes, and then I show exactly the same boy, but this time with big brown eyes. This keeps students on their toes and gets them to practise the grammar in an entertaining way. If you have no pictures, you can use visual information about the students in your class as verbal prompts! You might expect your students to say: "The boy with the big brown eyes is looking out of the window."

I sometimes write a long noun phrase down on a piece of paper.

I then cut up the sentence into the different words of the noun phrase. I then give each word to different individual students. The students with a bit of paper then stand up and have to rearrange themselves so that the noun phrase makes sense. I tell them where the front of the noun phrase should be - and the end. I also tell the students only to show their word to one student at a time. This makes the activity more demanding and more fun. One example is: "The / very / tall / blonde / girl / who / has got / a small pink case"

I encourage students to write noun phrases which are appropriate to the register they're aiming for.

For example, for an ESP class who need to give papers / presentations, I use a lot of authentic and contrastive reading input so that the students can formulate appropriate language. If you're teaching a general English class, you can use input that focuses on formal, neutral, and informal register, such as 'Thanks for your email' (neutral), 'Ta' (informal, where the noun phrase can be elided), and 'We thank you for your correspondence' (formal, where there is a full sentence and the lexical item is more abstract).

Conclusion

In conclusion, noun phrases and verb phrases are equally important. So noun phrases really shouldn't be ignored by coursebook / syllabus writers or teachers. All these people can help students understand how noun phrases fit into the syntax of a sentence, produce more complex noun phrases (as they become more advanced), and become aware of how noun phrases operate differently in different registers.

Further reading

Giorgi and Longobardi The Syntax of Noun Phrases, Cambridge University Press

Miller and Weinert Spontaneous Spoken Discourse, Oxford University Press

Paul Bress

http://www.studymode.com/essays/The-Noun-Phrase-In-English-1014524.html

Among the five different types of phrases in English namely noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases and prepositional phrases, noun phrases are the most common playing various syntactic functions in the sentence and clause structure: subject, object and complement (of various kinds), apposition and attribute. They are used to refer to things that people want to talk about: people, objects, concepts, processes and all kind of entities. However, the problem arises here: “How can we construct noun phrases, both basic and complex ones?” This article is to deal with the structure of basic and complex noun phrases.

II. Developement:

1. Basic noun phrase

Structurally speaking, in the first place, basic noun phrases consist of pronouns, numerals or nouns with articles (indefinite, definite or zero) or nouns with other closed-system items that occur before the noun head including pre-determiners (pre-det), determiners (det.) and post-determiners (post-det.). The underlined parts of the following sentences are good examples of basic noun phrases:

| |I |stayed at |home |during |all |the |last few |days | |

| |pronoun | |zero article + noun | |pre-de |+ det |+ post-det |+ noun | |

| |Some people |dislike |‘13’ | | | | | | |

| |det. + noun | |numeral...

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How can I write a short essay on nouns and noun phrases?I must write a comprehensive...

If this is to be a "cut and dry" assignment, it seems rather challenging, to say the least, as there is not enough factual information with which one can compose an entire essay. However, if there can be some light-hearted humor added, a creative piece can both entertain and inform the reader. For instance, the writer can propose that the reader consider how difficult his/her world would be without nouns, the names that people assign to persons, places, things, or abstract concepts. Why, one would constantly have to use descriptives to describe a particular person or thing. So, instead of writing "my friend," for example, a person must say something like this: "I and my laughing, going, and doing, caring, and sharing." Communication would become nonsensical, of course.

It is, therefore, imperative that people be able to name that which they speak or write about in their lives. Nouns, a word derived from the Latin word meaning "name," specifically indicate concrete objects, people, or places, as well as abstract ideas and qualities. In explaining nouns, then, the writer may provide examples of each type of noun.

A noun phrase consists of a main noun and its determiners and modifiers. These noun phrases are employed as subjects, objects, and complements, that is, subject complements (also termed predicate nominatives). For example,

The severe winds broke many tree limbs. [subject and direct object]

My father is an organic farmer. [subject and subject complement, or predicate nominative]

His farm is on many acres. [subject, complement of subject (linking verb be/is), and object of the preposition on.]

The determiners a, an, this, and that are used with singular nouns. Other determiners, such as some, few, these, and those are used with plural nouns.

Modifiers are limiting and descriptive adjectives.

Verbals , or verb forms, can also be used as nouns. And because of their origin as verbs, verbals in phrases often have their own objects and modifiers. Such verbals are infinitive phrases, participial phrases, and gerund phrases.

To succeed, one must study hard. [Infinitive phrase as a object.]

Riding a horse was her goal [gerund phrase as a subject. Gerunds are the -ing verb form that function as a noun, usually serving as the subject or object]

Planning her trips carefully, Janie decided to travel with a companion. [Participial phrase as a subject. Participles are the -ing form that function as verbals.]