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Teachers Activity links ____________________ Grammar advanced intermediate beginning ____________________ Reading abridged stories paraphrasing ____________________ Writing essay skills verb choice end focus ____________________ Listening Speaking Teaching Vowels s- endings note-taking skills ____________________ more to come... ____________________ created and maintained by Douglas E. Adams		Changing Grammar: The Grammar Toolbox- page 3 In addition to gerunds and infinitives, another tool students at the intermediate-level and above can employ is noun clauses; especially those using what, that, why, when, and who. Thus, for the sentence...      ex: The purchase of the Louisiana territory increased the size of the United States. ....using the verb as a starting point, we can create a subject noun clause sentence.      ex: What increased the size of the United States was the purchase of the Louisiana territory. For many sentences, there are a variety of different noun clauses that can be created depending upon which noun clause subordinator students choose. I like to teach students a strategy for identifying the possible noun clause creations that involves asking questions about the different parts of a sentence. Most sentences can be divided into “chunks of meaning”. These are segments of a sentence/phrases that should probably be kept together.      ex: Members of Congress created a new law to reduce taxes for wealthy people. We can divide the sentence above into segments that answer the questions Who, What, and Why.      We can begin a noun clause with each of these question words.      ex: Who created a new law to reduce taxes for wealthy people were members of Congress.      ex: Why members of Congress created a new law was to reduce taxes for wealthy people.      ex: What members of Congress created was a new law to reduce taxes for wealthy people. ...our choice of subordinator affects the degree to which the original sentence is changed.      ex:To reduce taxes for wealthy people, what members of Congress created was a new law. It’s also worth mentioning that the noun clauses above can also be written as subject complements because we used a form of “be” as our main verb for the sentence.      ex:Members of Congress were who created a new law to reduce taxes for wealthy people.      ex:To reduce taxes for wealthy people was why members of Congress created a new law.      ex:A new law to reduce taxes for wealthy people was what members of Congress created. Soon to come... Let's continue our discussion with Changing Grammar - page 4.

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