How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Noun phrases and verb phrases
How to teach grammar

Somewhere in the dark ooze at the bottom of the Thames lie the bones of that strange visitor to our shores.⁵

Noun phrases and verb phrases are especially important in literary texts because they add meaning and nuance. They also help students to develop writing without the need to add ten extra conjunctions. In the above sentence we can see the following noun phrases:

the dark ooze

the bottom of the Thames

the bones of that strange visitor to our shores

Noun phrases also help to make students more precise in their writing. They will often chuck nouns at the reader, but only the more skilled will add the precise detail and expand them into noun phrases. Getting students to see how and why a writer has developed a noun phrase is really quite useful.

Knowledge of noun phrases and verb phrases is something we need to work harder on in the classroom. We need to be reading texts to experience and comment on them so, in turn, students can absorb, learn and recall them for later use.

I get them to learn these structures:

✵ adjective noun

✵ adjective, adjective noun

✵ adjective, adjective and adjective noun

✵ adjective, adjective, adjective noun

✵ adjective and adjective noun

If students learn the syntax of noun phrases, their memory is focused on this rather than the ’I must remember to use adjectives’ approach. There’s so much going on in our heads when we write that it helps to have preformed syntactical structures to hand. Students then are drilled on the above so that they know that whenever they need to describe a noun they have several options for doing so.