Day 5: Are You Referring To Me?

Hi, I’m Teacher Rosalind from Fun Language Learning. This is the fifth article of the 14 Closely Guarded Cloze Tips  series brought to you by LearnSuperMart and Fun Language Learning. 

As a bilingual specialist, I help Primary and Secondary school students achieve their desired grades in English and Chinese by guiding them to develop effective language learning strategies and skills.

1. One huge aspect of Language Clues is ‘Parts of Speech’. Understanding how a word fits in a sentence helps you select the most suitable word choice. 

From the title, can you guess the two parts of speech we are covering today?

 

2. Did you guess Pronouns and Determiners?

The book is mine.

Mine → Pronoun            The → Determiner

Both pronouns and determiners make reference to nouns.

 

3. How do you identify that a certain type of pronoun is required?

Pronouns replace nouns that have been mentioned before.

 

Clue: From the placement of the blank in a sentence, you can tell if it is used as a subject/object OR to indicate possession/refer to itself.

 

Point of view	SINGULAR				PLURAL
	Subject	Object	Possess-ion	Self-referring	Subject	Object	Possess-ion	Self-referring
Placement in a sentence	I have this book.	This book belongs to me.	This is my book. This book is mine.	I wrote this book myself.	We have this book.	This book belongs to us.	This is our book.   This book is ours.	We wrote this book ourselves.
1st person	I	me	my mine	myself	we	us	our ours	ourselves
2nd  person	you	you	your yours	yourself	you	you	your yours	yourselv-es
3rd  person	he she it	him her it	his her its   his hers its	himself herself itself	they	them	their theirs	themselv-es

 

Replace the red words with the blue words to form sentences with different points of view.

 

Here is a list of other pronouns:

what, which, who, whose, whom, where, this, that, these, those, each, one, others, another, each other, one another, everybody, somebody, anybody, nobody, everyone, someone, anyone, no one, everything, something, anything, nothing, all, most, some, any, none, many, several, few, both

Familiarise yourselves with the most commonly misunderstood pronouns—who, whom and whose.

 

Point of view	Subject	Object	Possession
Placement in a sentence	John was the one who passed me the book.	John was the one from whom I received the book.	The boy, whose name was John, passed me the book.
Placement in a question	Who passed you the book?	From whom did you receive the book?	Whose book is this?
	who	whom	whose

 

4. How do you identify that an article is required?

Determiners are words that introduce a noun.

Articles (‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’) are a type of determiner. They are introduced in Day 4.

 

Clue: The blank is before a noun.

‘A’ and ‘An’ refer to a noun when it is first introduced.

e.g.

a)  A boy was reading a book under a tree.

‘The’ refers to a specific noun.

b) the sun

There is only one sun so we don’t say ‘a sun’.

Suddenly, he closed the book and stood up.

The book was mentioned in Example a.

5. How do you identify that a quantifier is required?

Quantifiers are also a type of determiner. They give you an idea of the quantity or amount of something.

 

Clue: The blank is before a noun.

 

Quantity	Countable Nouns	Uncountable Nouns
	Books, cups, ideas	Salt, money, equipment
Large quantity	Many Numerous	Much
	A lot of/ lots of Plenty of A great deal of Most of
Medium quantity	Several A number of	Some
Small quantity	A few Not many	A little A bit of Not much
	Less

 

6. Try this:

i) She asked ____________ if I needed her help.

ii) A ____________ of people were late for the concert as the train had broken down.

iii) ______ coin that I picked up in the morning is now in the donation box.

 

 

Visit fllacademy.com or like Fun Language Learning Facebook Page for more language learning resources.

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