Imagine yourself in class. Take a look around. What do you see?
Probably your students, the whiteboard, the desks, perhaps a window, the door, the teacher (you!), some pictures on the wall …
The words used to name these things are called NOUNS.
You can touch all these things. They are solid, so we call them CONCRETE nouns.
Some examples from the text are:
students and colleagues
Using CLIL, students learn one or more of their school subjects in a foreign language, often English (1).
Now think about the students. Imagine all the emotions they could be feeling:
happiness, sadness, boredom, excitement, love, dislike, friendship ...
We have to name these things too. They are also nouns, but you can’t touch them. They are called ABSTRACT nouns.
Abstract nouns aren’t only feelings. Classroom management is abstract, and so is testing, as well as a lot of other names we give to activities, such as reading, teaching or studying.
Some examples from the text include:
learning, content, language, information, future
What about naming the students? If you say that:
Tim is a student at the Executive Training Institute in St Julians, in Malta
You are giving specific names to the student, the school, the town and the country. These are called PROPER nouns, and always start with a capital letter.
School subjects like History, or Mathematics, are both proper nouns and abstract nouns, as is CLIL and English.
Another type of noun is the COLLECTIVE noun. For example, we can think of all the students we teach as one class. Other collective nouns are information, group, team, family and army.
Did you notice that classroom management (mentioned above) is made up of 2 nouns? It is a COMPOUND noun. Some other compound nouns are staff meeting, mid-term assessment and Christmas holiday.
In the text we can find:
mother tongue and project teams
Download: Nouns