Types of word – Conjunctions, interjections, & determiners

These final types of words are often small in form, but can be useful in very different ways once mastered by students.

They’re a little bit more complicated than the previous words we’ve covered, but if you read through their descriptions and examples carefully, you’ll soon build familiarity with them.

Conjunctions

Conjunctions are words that are used to join together sentences, ideas, phrases, or clauses. They are usually fairly small words and many of them are taught early to new English learners.

Examples include:

And, if, but, or, for.

Conjunctions fall into two groups – coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions.

Coordinating conjunctions link items that have equal status/importance grammatically. The commonest coordinating conjunctions are and, or, but.

Examples of coordinating conjunctions:

Uncomfortable but happy

Apple pie or jelly

Their parents arrived, and they called room service.

I thought it would snow, but it didn’t.

You’ll be able to notice how in these examples, the joined halves are equal in value/importance. One way to teach coordinating conjunctions can be to give students a simple sentence such as “I want to eat…” and then having students add to this sentence with ‘and’, or give alternative options using ‘or’.

If the two items being linked do not have equal status/importance grammatically, then a subordinating conjunction is used. Common subordinating conjunctions include before, since, till, unless, whereas, whether.

Examples of subordinating conjunctions:

Businesses fail because they can’t pay their bills.

I passed the test although I didn’t study.

In these examples, the first halves “Businesses fail” and “I passed the test” are more dominant, and the resulting halves “they can’t pay their bills” and “I didn’t study” are weaker and rely upon information from the first half.

A technique for teaching subordinating conjunctions can be to ask students why something happens and then help them to form a reply. An example here can be seen by asking  “Why do you drink water?”, to which a student would reply “I drink water because I get thirsty”.

Interjections

Interjections are small comments that have specific meanings often caused by strong emotions. Interjections may not be essential to your students’ learning in terms of examinations, but are still important to help them better understand native speakers.

Here are several common interjections:

Oh dear, uh oh, huh.

A fun and effective way to introduce interjections can be to ask your students to notice the emotions on each other’s faces. You can then have the students try to match these emotions with appropriate interjections. Another approach could be to call out interjections and have students to try act out a suitable emotion. This is a surefire way to inject a little fun into your class.

Determiners

Determiners are words that are placed before nouns to help show which noun is being referred to. It might sound quite complicated, but don’t worry, it’s actually quite simple.

Look at this sentence:

“I want to eat apple” – It’s not really clear what the speaker is referring to. However, if we add different determiners, the situation becomes much more clear.

Now look at these sentences:

“I want to eat the apple”, “I want to eat an apple”, “I want to eat that apple”, I want to eat this apple”, I want to eat those apples”, I want to eat many apples”, I want to eat ten apples”, I want to eat another apple”.

All of these words are determiners: an, that, this, those, many, ten, another.  They help us to understand the context surrounding the nouns used in sentences.

You can help students to learn about determiners by asking them questions involving “which” and “how many”. Examples of such questions could be “How many apples do you want to eat?” and “Which apple do you want to eat?”