There are SEVEN parts of speech that you need to know for Year 9 English.

They are:
Nouns – naming words-name any person, thing, place, feeling or idea
Verbs - , doing, being or having words – actions;
Adjectives – describing words – describe nouns (things)
Adverbs – describing words – describe verbs, actions
Conjunctions – joining words, used to join 2 parts of sentence together
Pronouns – replace nouns, stand in for nouns – (he, she, I, we)
Prepositions – tell you position – up, down, under, over, behind

Starting with nouns, what are the four types:

• Common nouns – objects, things – desk, pencil, hairbrush
• Abstract nouns – something that you can’t touch but is an idea or an emotion, a
concept. Often they end in –tion, ness, ence/ance, ism, ship, - anger, love,
determination, friendship, loneliness, beauty, hatred
• Collective – groups of things – pod, swarm, team, choir, audience,
• Proper noun – the name of a place or a person – always takes a capital letter

Identify the nouns in these sentences:

The day is sunny
The first girl is very tall
The class is quiet
The teacher sent the naughty girl to Miss Trunchball
The girl was full of anger with the teacher

Verbs are the doing, being or having words in the language.

Common verbs that are often missed out are:
The verb to be which looks like this:
I am,
You are
He or she or it is
We are
They are
Remember, this verb also changes in the past tense but it is still a verb!
To have
I have, you have he/she/it has, we have they have etc…and in the past tense it
changes (I had etc)
To do
I do, you do, he/she/it does, we do, they do (and in the past I did etc..)

Identify these verbs:

On Wednesday we went to town.
Yesterday I did housework.
Today is my birthday.
Usually I go to school.
Remember: verbs carry the tense in a language – past, present, future, so don’t be
fooled!
Some tenses often as an extra bit, (called an auxiliary), so the verb is actually two
words. These are called verb phrases eg:
I am going home
We are running late
I didn’t have lunch

Identify the verb phrases in these sentences:

We are going to the movies
Kath and Kim are coming to New Zealand
One day I will go to Australia to see them

Adjectives are describing words. They describe nouns and USUALLY go before the
noun:
EG: The silly girl sniggered.
Girl = noun
Silly = adjective because it tells you what sort of girls she was.
Sniggered = verb (the action that she does)

By changing the adjective, it changes the colour or the feeling of the sentence eg
The beautiful girl…
The grumpy girl..
The unhappy girl..
Adjectives sometimes end in:
-y
- ful
- ious (eg precious)
- ive (eg defensive)
- al (eg critical)

Identify the adjectives here:

Once I was a young woman
Today is a cloudy day
The man is very superficial
In New Zealand we have lots of cuddly and smelly sheep
One other thing to remember about adjectives is the comparative and superlative
forms.
Comparatives compare – they are the –er forms – bigger, brighter, faster, better
Superlatives are the best – superlative means “the best” - so they are –est forms –
fastest, quickest, meanest, prettiest

Adverbs are like adjectives because they describe, but they describe verbs (they
ADD to verbs)
They tell you HOW an action was done and commonly end in –ly
EG: The boy ran swiftly home.
The man walked gingerly down the steps because he was old.
The girl’s hair blew wildly in the wind.

Identify the adverbs here:

The sun shone brightly through the curtains
The teacher stumbled clumsily down the steps. The children laughed loudly.

Conjunctions join parts of sentences together. “con” means “with” – so think of them
putting one part of a sentence “with” another.
Common conjunctions are: and, but, because, although, however, despite,…

Sometimes little children tell stories using TOO MANY conjunctions and the writing
sounds breathless – eg:
I went into my classroom and there was my friend and we played and I liked her and
then the bell went and we sat on the mat and it was news time and I shared news.

Identify the conjunctions in the following:

Because I am a girl, I can wear a dress.
I am a girl and I have long hair
I am a girl but I have short hair
I am a girl although sometimes people think I am weird because I don’t like dresses.

Pronouns are NOT nouns themselves so don’t confuse them with Proper nouns. They
are words like: I, you , we, us, they, he, she, it, her, him, my…
They have a different job – to stand in for nouns so that we don’t sound boring and
repetitive eg:

Mrs Woof licked her dinner bowl and thought about Mrs Woof’s lovely jelly meat
supper. Mrs Woof loved jelly meat and Mrs Woof’s owner only gave it to Mrs Woof
once a day. The rest of the time Mrs Woof had to make do with those nasty biscuit
things which Mrs Woof did not really like.
Rewrite the above paragraph substituting some of the proper nouns (Mrs Woof), with
an accurate pronoun.

Finally…prepositions which are words that tell us POSITION. They are a group of
words like:
Under, beyond, in, above, beside, between, below, around etc..

Identify the prepositions in the following:

Rosie walked down the track and into the barn. She took one look at the rooster
sitting on the haystack and continued out the door and along the fence. She hid under
the bush when a fox approached, and then went safely up the hill to her little hutch.