Using adverbs to premodify adjectives and other adverbs

During Sentence Toolkit training last week some questions arose about using adverbs to modify adjectives and other adverbs.

With primary children, we usually introduce adverbs/adverbial phrases as describing where, how or when the action has taken place in a sentence.  We explain how these words can provide our reader with more information and also create different effects, depending on where in the sentence they are positioned. 

We also show children how adverbs and adverbial phrases can be used cohesively, to link to prior information in the text.  These connecting adverbials can be used to structure/sequence the text (as 'in addition', 'moreover', 'furthermore' do when we are structuring paragraphs in a persuasive piece or writing) or they can add writer opinion (for example, 'obviously', 'certainly', 'surely').

However, there are some adverbs that can be placed in front of an adjective or another adverb to provide the reader with more information about 'how much' of the adjective is applicable in the sentence, or 'to what degree' the adverb describes the verb.  Being used in these ways, adverbs can be incorporated into noun phrases, adjective phrases or adverbial phrases.  In the following three sentences, I've highlighted the premodifying adverb.

• The rather quiet child sat in the corner.
• The princess was very beautiful.
• He ate his meal extremely quickly.

There is a confusing terminology around the groups of adverbs that can act in this way.  Depending on the grammar book you look in, this group of adverbs may be referred to as modifiers, sub-modifiers, intensifiers, emphasizing adverbs, or adverbs of degree.  I wouldn't worry too much about these terms/sub-categories, especially not with the children; just model how useful they are in writing!

Once children understand how this special group of adverbs behave, it might be a good idea to collect them on your working wall, so there are a range of words to choose from.  This will avoid over use of 'very' and 'extremely'.

I promised the delegates on the course that I would provide a list of some of these adverbs.  Below are two charts which may be useful for activities, especially in guided work.  Children can experiment with slotting them into noun phrases before the adjective, or in front of other adverbs, to see whether they make sense and add relevant information for the reader.  However, do explore texts and discover more examples with the children to add to your own collections!

Some adverbs which can be used to premodify adjectives
absolutely	almost	awfully
badly	completely	considerably
dearly	deeply	drastically
dreadfully	enormously	entirely
exceedingly	extraordinarily	extremely
fairly	fully	greatly
hard	hugely	immensely
incredibly	just	largely
moderately	nearly	noticeably
partly	perfectly	poorly
positively	powerfully	practically
pretty	purely	quite
rather	really	reasonably
remarkably	significantly	simply
slightly	strongly	sufficiently
surprisingly	terribly	totally
tremendously	truly	unbelievably
utterly	very	wonderfully

The most common adverbs which can be used to premodify other adverbs
awfully	exceedingly	extraordinarily
extremely	fairly	incredibly
moderately	noticeably	pretty
quite	rather	really
reasonably	remarkably	sufficiently
surprisingly	terribly	tremendously
unbelievably	very	wonderfully

Adjective phrases and complementation

I’ve been asked a few times recently about adjective phrases and feel it’s about time I tried to unpick the subject knowledge surrounding these.

We are very familiar with using adjectives or strings of adjectives in front of a noun to create a noun phrase and, in this type of phrase, the noun is the head word.  For example, ‘the lazy, luminous, long-tailed lizard’ contains the adjectives ‘lazy’, ‘luminous’ and ‘long-tailed’ and these are pre-modifying the head word in the phrase which is the noun ‘lizard’. 

Adjective phrases are phrases where the adjective is the head of the phrase, as in the following examples:

The princess was very beautiful.

The policeman’s hunch proved entirely correct.

The decorators painted the room bright pink.

The strong wind made the children quite crazy.

These phrases fill the complement ‘slots’ in a sentence and provide information about the subject or object in the sentence.  Of course, this complement slot can also be filled by a single adjective: The princess was beautiful. 

Complements are one of the five sentence/clause elements in our language and are probably the least familiar to primary teachers.  The sentence elements are as follows:

S – subject

V – verb

O – object (which can be direct or indirect)

A – adverbial

C – complement

Complements do not have to be filled by adjectives/adjective phrases; they can also be nouns/noun phrases.  In the sentence ‘He became a doctor.’ the noun phrase highlighted is a subject complement as it is completing the information about the subject ‘he’.  This gives the structure S V C.

However complements do need to be used with a particular group of verbs, which are often referred to as ‘link’ verbs or copulas.  The verbs which can most commonly be used as link verbs are be, seem appear (look), feel, get, keep, become, turn.  Often the verbs which describe our senses (look, smell, sound, taste, feel) can be used as link verbs. 

If children know verbs as ‘doing words’, these link verbs are often the ones they have difficulty with, as it is harder to understand that they ‘do’ anything.  They more commonly express a state of being.  So really, it’s best to be clear with children and use the correct terminology ‘verb’ – it’s shorter than ‘doing word’ in any event!

Developing punctuation using an authentic text - Ask Dr K Fisher about Animals

I’ve been asked to recommend a text that a teacher could use to develop children’s understanding and use of punctuation, beyond full stops. 

‘Ask Dr K Fisher about Animals’ by Claire Llewellyn is a great text to develop a range of punctuation marks; depending on where your punctuation focus lies, it can be used in different ways.  Obviously, when you are teaching these punctuation marks, this will be alongside teaching of the grammatical feature with which they are used.  For example commas within lists of adjectives in a noun phrase, or commas/dashes/brackets to enclose additional information, writer's comment, etc.

There are other books in the ‘Ask Dr. Fisher’ series, but in this text a teacher could explore the use of the following punctuation (page references for examples provided):

• question marks: 4, 6, 10, 12, 16, 22, 24, 28 
•  exclamation marks: 7, 8, 9, 13, 18, 19, 23, 28, 29
• commas in lists: 4, 6, 11, 12, 15, 18, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31 (not page 10 as these clauses are comma spliced, but you could make a teaching point and correct with use of semi-colons!)
• commas to demarcate clauses: 5, 6, 7, 15, 17, 19, 20 (for relative clause), 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 31 (relative clauses)
•  commas surrounding additional information/embedded clauses: 7, 11, 13, 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31
• apostrophes for contractions: 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 28
•  hyphens: 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 30, 31
•  dashes: 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 16, 25, 29
•  brackets: 10, 13, 15, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28 (some of these used to support text structure and organisation (layout of text), rather than use within a sentence)
•  colons: 4, 13, 14 & 15 (for list), 19, 22, 28 (the colons used within sentences in the text -as opposed to those introducing a list - are excellent examples.  The information after the colon elaborates or explains the statement before.)
• apostrophes for possession: 8, 9, 29

The only punctuation I wouldn't use would be the Oxford commas before 'and', which are used occasionally in this text.  It's a comma used traditionally by printers/editors at OUP and can be used to clarify meaning in some long, complicated lists of clauses.  However, it isn't really needed in this book to clarify meaning.

I may have missed a few, but I hope there's enough here to be going on with!

To see other texts recommended on this blog, click here.  And for more Texts that Teach, check out this link. 

The passive voice - using different verb tenses and forms

A colleague asked me the other day about using the passive in different verb tenses and forms and what these would look like.  Most teachers are fairly confident in using the simple present and simple past passive forms, but it is important to know what the other forms look like, especially when identifying good examples in authentic texts to use in class.   

As the passive is included in the statutory appendix of the 2014 National Curriculum and is required teaching for year 6 pupils, I thought it might be useful to post some key subject knowledge about the active and passive voices and detail the most common passive tenses and forms, with examples.

Most of the sentences we write are in the active voice.  In this structure, the subject of the sentence is the person or thing which is doing the action and the object of the sentence is what is being affected by the action.  For example:

The dog      chased       the cat.

subject               verb               object

doing the      (active form)       affected by

action                                       the action

The passive voice is formed by using a form of the verb ‘be’ and the past participle of the main verb.  In the passive, the person or thing being affected by the action becomes the subject of the sentence; the person or thing doing the action may or may not be provided.  For example:

The cat        was chased.

subject          verb (past passive form)

affected

by action

The cat        was chased          by the dog

subject                     verb                       preposition + the agent

affected         (past passive form)         doing the action

by action

Below are examples of different tenses and verb forms in the passive, using the main verb ‘fly’.  The list isn’t exhaustive, but provides the most common variations and a few less usual ones.

She is flown.                                             Simple present passive

She was flown.                                          Simple past passive

She is being flown.                                     Present continuous passive

She was being flown.                                 Past continuous passive

She has been flown.                                  Present perfect passive

She had been flown.                                  Past perfect passive

She will be flown.                                      Simple future passive

She is going to be flown.                           Simple future passive (is going to)

She will be being flown.                             Future continuous passive

She is going to be being flown.                   Future continuous passive (although I find this an ugly structure)

She has been being flown.                         Present perfect continuous passive

She had been being flown.                         Past perfect continuous passive

She will have been flown.                           Future perfect passive

She is going to have been flown.                 Future perfect passive

She could have been flown.                       Conditional present perfect passive

She would have been being flown.              Conditional present perfect continuous passive

It will be important for children to understand that we use the passive to create more formality in writing and that it is often used to distance the writer from the content being presented.  In some cases this enables the writer to ‘hide’ responsibility.  For example, the omission of the agent in the sentence below would hide who to blame or to thank, depending on your point of view and occupation.  (Although for many teachers I know, this would be a shorter working day!)

‘It has been decided to extend the school day to 9.00 pm.’

Of course, when writing, we may not know who the agent is and cannot include this information in our sentence.  For example, in journalistic writing, the perpetrator of a crime may not be known: The statue was damaged last night, at around ten.

More dragons: developing sentence structure using online texts

If you’re running with the theme of dragons, then a great online text is ‘A Hero’s Guide to Deadly Dragons’.  Containing extracts from the book, this online resource contains a number of pages which provide descriptions and details about some of the deadly dragons. 

I would use this text to help children develop:

·         Description (linked to adjective, simile and noun phrase tools in the Sentence Toolkit).  This could range from adding one or two adjectives to describe an attribute, to building up more subtle descriptions, e.g. ‘all shades of brown’; ‘as black as your darkest nightmare’.  It could also be used to help the children understand the difference between description suitable for narrative and the more precise description used in non-fiction texts (although this is still a fantasy based text, so contains some narrative-like description in places).

·         Punctuation (screwdrivers in the Sentence Toolkit).  There are some good examples in this text demonstrating correct use of commas in lists and to demarcate clauses, but also use of hyphens, brackets and dashes.  However, there is perhaps rather more use of ellipses than you would want to see in your children’s writing.

Once you have investigated the dragons with the children and explored the sentence structures and punctuation you want to develop, children could design their own dragons.  These could then be used to compile a group or class book of more deadly dragons.

Poppy has designed her dragon below.  I would use a picture such as this for shared writing, so that I could model writing each stage of the description and the detailed paragraph.

 

To see other texts recommended on this blog, click here.  And for more Texts that Teach, check out this link.