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Topic: Noun phrase

These resources cover noun phrases: phrases with a noun or pronoun as the Head word. Noun phrases can be quite short and simple, like this hat or an egg, but can also be built up into longer and more complex structures, like a very nice guy, every single person without a computer background or the woman who'd led them for their entire political career.

Expanded noun phrase competition

Creating longer (expanded) noun phrases

Noun phrases can be of any length, from one word to very many words. This activity is a team competition where students' goal is to score as many points as they can by creating longer and longer noun phrases. As they do this, they will implicitly rely on their knowledge of grammar, and they will begin to see a range of different ways to expand noun phrases.

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02: Adjectives and expanded noun phrases

Year 2 Guided Grammar Lessons #2

This is Lesson #2 of a unit of 10.

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Teacher Slide

Objective: grammar

To understand the grammatical characteristics of adjectives and expanded noun phrases.

Objective: writing

To explore the roles that adjectives and expanded noun phrases play in writing, and to apply this to the pupils' own writing.

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Analysing representation in romantic fiction

Lesson plan for Mills and Boon exercise

Goal

  • Use linguistic tools to analyse representation in romantic fiction

    Lesson plan

    Gathering the noun phrases and verbs relating to particular topics in a text can be a good first step in analysing the representation of those topics. This lesson uses blurbs from the Mills & Boon website to discuss how those texts represent gender and how that might suit its readers.

    Give students the blurbs and have them read out.

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    Genre of Recipes

    Lesson Plan

    Goals: 

    • Compare the discourse structure and register features of two recipes
    • Identify which grammatical features can be omitted for effect 
    • Analyse why recipes follow a predictable structure and set of features

    Lesson Plan

    Before this lesson, you may want to complete the lesson An Introduction to Genre, so that learners are familiar with the key terms discourse structure and register

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    Genre of Recipes

    Activities

    Warmer 

    Discuss with a partner: 

    • What's your favourite meal? 
    • What recipes can you cook? 
    • What kind of information do recipes normally include?

    Activity 1 

    In pairs or small groups, read recipes A and B. Take turns describing each recipe, and then discuss with your partner: 

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    KS1 noun phrase generator

    Use the interactive whiteboard to generate weird and wonderful noun phrases. 

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    Noun phrase generator

    Try this noun phrase generator in class. Your students will enjoy creating weird and funny noun phrases using the interactive whiteboard.

    Goals

    • Create some new noun phrases.
    • Examine what can and can't happen in noun phrases.
    • Evaluate example noun phrases, looking at why they do or don't work.

    Lesson Plan

    The teacher explains that today, we will be generating noun phrases. 

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    Noun phrase generator: Activity

    Use the interactive whiteboard to generate weird and wonderful noun phrases. 

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    Identify the noun phrase Head

    Find the Head word (the most pivotal word) of each highlighted phrase

    Identify the Head in each of the following bracketed noun phrases.

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    Identify the type of phrase

    Identify the type of phrase (noun phrase, preposition phrase, etc.) in each of the examples. Although we have included verb phrases as an option, remember that the National Curriculum calls these clauses.

     

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    Y2 GPaS Test: Identify the noun phrase

    Find the noun phrase in a range of examples

    Identify the noun phrase, consisting of several words, in each of the following clauses.

    Click on the words that comprise the noun phrase to select or deselect them.

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    Determiners

    Determiners form a class of words that occur in the left-most position inside noun phrases. They thus precede nouns, as well as any adjectives that may be present.

    The most common determiners are the and a/an (these are also called the definite aticle and indefinite article).

    Here are some more determiners:

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    Determiners: Advanced

    The following is taken from Bas Aarts's Grammarianism blog.

    In a recent blog post on terminology I mentioned the word class of determiners, and said that they are a relatively new word class.

    By 'relatively new' I mean 'early twentieth century'. The National Curriculum Glossary definition, determiner, is very brief, here I'll expand on it.

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    Noun phrases

    Noun phrases are phrases which have as their Head word a noun or pronoun.

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    Phrases

    A phrase consists of one or more words that belong together. It takes one of the major word class elements (noun, adjective, etc.) as its Head.

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