How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Nouns, adjectives and verbs
How to teach non-fiction

Decluttering a text can help us to explore the meaning and the writer’s choices, and having a look at the use of nouns, verbs and adjectives can really unlock things. Here is an extract where Robert Louis Stevenson describes the landscape of the Bay of Monterey in America:

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. It would be hard to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to the mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea. Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves, trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea-tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale’s carcass, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands. The waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and down the long key-board of the beach. The foam of these great ruins mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker. The interest is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean’s greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of thunder in the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.⁶

When presented with lists like this, students get to see the interconnectivity between words. Taken in isolation, they might begin to notice how very understated the nouns and verbs are. They’d also see how the adjectives are doing most of the work. You could make the linguistic analysis deeper by exploring further sub-categories which the students offer or you might look at the use of determiners, adverbs, etc., but the helpful thing is to see how the language works in isolation. Look at how the adjectives ’long’ and ’idle’ relate to each other. Can you find any connections between these words? How do these words suggest a sense of peace and simplicity?

There are numerous other activities to do with word lists, such as:

✵ Produce a new text using these words.

✵ Pair or group the words.

✵ Explore alternatives and replace them in the original text.