Sookmyung Women’s University
Graduate School of TESOL
Teaching Writing
Spring 2010
Some Basic English Sentences
The purpose of looking at this is to show that is it not that hard to build fairly complex looking sentences out of almost nothing. By showing these templates and then giving the students a chance to practice with them, we can demystify the sentence creation process and give a new grammatical paradigm to out students. In the sentences below S stands for Subject, V for Verb, O for Object, C for Complement and A for Adjunct.
Some Basic Active Sentences
S V
The porcupinewas eating.
S V O
The elephantsawthe porcupine.
SV C
The elephantishungry.
S V A
The elephantsaton the porcupine.
S V O A
The elephantkilledthe porcupinedead.
S V O O
The dead porcupinegavethe elephantgreat pain.
S VO C
The elephant`s mothercalledthe elephantan idiot.
Phrases
The armadillo died.
The stupid armadillo died.
The big, fat stupid armadillo died.
All the big fat stupid armadillos died.
All the big fat stupid armadillos in the forest died.
Coordination
The boyandthe girl want to eat alligator steak.
The boy from Seoulandthe girl from Pusan want to eat alligator steak.
The boy from Seoul wants to killandthe girl from Pusan wants to eat an alligator.
Not the boy but the girl wanted to wrestle the feisty alligator.
Exercise
Here is an exercise which will allow your students to practice making sentences. Use the words clustered in each group to make a meaningful sentence. The sentences created from all the clusters should make a story. The sentences are in the right order, so you can use the preceding context to help you figure out what the sentence might be. Let the meaning be your guide.
a was elephant once big there , old .
mean the very elephant and was hungry .
some needed food to it eat .
of saw it suddenly , pile a peanuts huge .
to ran peanuts the the lovely get elephant .
the crossing then , just lady was an old street .
out was the elephant of running her completely control towards .
the elephant noticed it could all about was the think peanuts , never because the old lady .
she her elephant coming of and took quickly a the baseball bat saw out handbag .
the elephant it before would have right crushed , she hit her hard the bat with .
crying elephant started the .
The old lady felt sorry for the elephant .
the hungry she buy decided lunch for to elephant .
big went for off a looking chairs restaurant tables and with they strong .