The answer is yes! There comes a time in your English acquisition journey that it makes sense to invest in learning language terminology, as many of you don’t know what an adverbial or predicate or complement is even in your first language. So it’s both – learning grammar words, and learning what their meanings. What terms do you need to recognize and get a firm grasp of? There is a checklist below. These checklists are phrased in ways that make sense to English learners, not other teachers.
Parts of Speech
Nouns and NPs
Verbs, verb chains, VPs
Adjective – regular and participal
Adverbs and adverbials
Preposition – movement and location
Conjunctions
Interjections
Pronouns – demonstrative, possessive, subject and object pronouns
Sentence Components
Subject
Predicate
Dynamic verbs – active and stative
Direct objects vs indirect objects
Linking verbs (also known as copular verbs)
Complements
Sentence, independent clause, dependent clause, phrase
Simple, compound, complex, compound-complex sentences
Concepts
Active vs passive voice – subject of the sentence vs doer of the action
Subject of a sentence vs subject and object of a verb
Tense vs aspect
Modality – grammatical modals and lexical modals
Gerunds vs infinitives
Transitive vs intransitive
Participles – verbal vs adjectival use
Syntax
NP (4 part NPs, gerunds, relative pronoun-lead clauses)
Determiners – articles, pronouns, quantifiers
4 part NPs – pre-modification can be adjectives or other nouns
4 part NPs – post-modification can be prepositional phrases, that- phrases, relative pronoun-lead clauses
embedded clauses & subordination
Movement rules – yes/no questions vs Wh- questions, helping verbs, negation
Do advanced English learners need to learn grammar terminology: parts of speech, sentence components, grammatical concepts, syntax?