The dorbling groobies frandled a bonkled slank.Ask students to identify the part of speech of various words. They’ll quickly tell you that groobies and slank are nouns. They will likely add that frandled is a verb. They may stumble a bit on dorbling and bonkled, but will soon label these as adjectives. (If they do stumble, it’s because these forms, in other positions, could be verbs; they’re aware that those -ing and -ed endings are typical verbal endings.) So how do they know all this? How do they know that groobies and slank are nouns? It’s certainly not because they are “persons, places, things, or even ideas” since these “things” don’t even exist. They know because of the morphology and syntax, because of the suffixes, in this case, on the words (their morphology) and because of the position of the words in relation to the other words (some of which are “real” words) in the rest of the sentence (the syntax). It is that kind of knowledge that we make use of all of the time to identify parts of speech and to learn real new words and how they function.
Move some of those words around and see what happens:
While she was dorbling, she bonkled some slank groobies.
He groobies on the weekends.Now what part of speech is dorbling or bonkled? Yep, they’re both verbs. We know this because of the morphology (the endings, or the affixes, on the words) and the syntax (the position of the words in relation to the other words). What’s slank here? It’s an adjective, which we know because of its position preceding groobies, which is still a noun. But in the next sentence, groobies is a verb. How do we know? Again, the endings and the position.
So a key lesson here is that we all already know everything we need to know about parts of speech, about the various lexical categories. We just need to make that unconscious knowledge into conscious knowledge. We make use of morphology and syntax constantly. Another important thing to note is that meaning-based definitions (a noun is a person, place, or thing; a verb is an action or state) are very limited and limiting, and can sometimes lead us astray. They can be good starting places, but it’s really the other information that our brain relies on to create the good sentences it creates all the time. So when we start paying attention to morphology and syntax, we’ll see that a whole new linguistic world opens up.
(You can read about doing a version of this with elementary kids in this article .)
If you'd like to print this out, here it is as a doc.
Hi Kristin,
ReplyDeleteI taught Noun Lesson 1 to my students. It went really well. I was surprised at how easily they grasped which words were nouns when they were in fact nonsense words. It brought up a question I have, which is why do they have so much trouble identifying nouns when they are real words? They really enjoyed the lesson and were proud when they managed to identify the nouns right away. They also liked rearranging the words. I like the fact that it helped them understand that words can shift from one grammatical category to another. As you know, I teach a similar lesson with syntax. I take a sentence and jumble it up. I ask students to put the words in the correct order, which they do quickly and easily. Then we have a discussion about how they manage to do that. I like your noun lesson better because it highlights what we can do with words and word order at the same time. We have gone on to Noun Lesson 2.
Thanks for the report, Beth!
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