This activity is based on the idea of register and how language choices are often linked closely to context.
At its simplest level, this could mean that if you are talking to small children you might adopt a more straightforward register, choosing sentence structures that don't involve too much complicated information delivered in one go.
In this lesson, we look at the difference between two kinds of
relative clause. A relative clause is a special kind of subordinate clause, and like other subordinate clauses it is introduced by a subordinating conjunction. More specifically, the introduction of a relative clause can be carried out by a relative pronoun.
The two types of relative clauses we will be looking at are:
In what situation would somebody use the clause the car which is yellow?
For example:
The car which is yellow is mine, the car which is blue is yours, and the car which is red is John’s.
If I say the car which is yellow, am I giving you more information about a particular car we were already talking about by telling you its colour, or am I helping you to identify the car by telling you that it is the yellow one I want to discuss, rather than a red or blue one?
Sort these examples of relative clauses from the ICE-GB corpus according to whether you think they are restrictive (identifying) or non-restrictive (adding). Were there any cases where you had difficulty deciding which reading to choose? What clues did you use to help you decide?
Non-restrictive relative clauses are often – although not always – surrounded by commas, which separate the additional information that the relative clause contains. In the following examples, see if you can put the commas in the right place to separate out the restrictive relative.
What did you and your family do on the holidays? In this activity you will experiment with our fun sentence generator which reports on some unusual holiday happenings!
This lesson invites students to explore a real transcript of natural conversational speech, like those used by linguists who analyse all aspects of language.
Goals
Explore a transcript of natural speech.
Identify attributes of natural speech.
Compare natural speech to written language.
Lesson Plan
The teacher explains that today, we will explore features of real spoken language.
To learn and practise the spelling rules associated with base words ending in 'y' when endings (suffixes) are added.
Lesson plan
The lesson is divided into a series of activities where students
group words according to whether they keep the final 'y' of the base word when a suffix is added, or change 'y' to 'i'. For each set of examples, students are
asked to identify and make predictions about the patterns for this area
of spelling.
To learn and practise the spelling rules associated with base words ending in consonant letters when endings (suffixes) are added.
Lesson plan
The lesson is divided into a series of activities where students
group words according to whether they double the final consonant letter when a suffix is added, or not. For each set of
examples, students are
asked to identify and make predictions about the patterns for this area
of spelling.
Englicious contains many resources for English language in schools, but the vast majority of them require you to register and log in first. For more information, see What is Englicious?
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