Types of word – Nouns, verbs, adjectives

Nouns, verbs and adjectives are usually the first types of words that your students will come across when starting to learn English. Below, we’ll cover what they are, and ideas on how to present them to students.

Nouns

Nouns are naming words and are used for things, places, people or ideas. They are often the very first things taught to English learners and are the most basic type of word.

Here are some examples of nouns:

Pen/pencil
Home/street
Girl/boy
Love/hate

One of the great things about nouns is that they can be easily shown to students, and often learned quickly. A great way to begin teaching nouns can be with concrete objects which can be brought into the classroom, or with images on flashcards. This way, students can easily build an association with the new word, and the object or idea which it represents.

There is also a subcategory of noun known as ‘proper nouns’. 

Proper nouns

Proper nouns are the names of specific people/places/organizations, and come with a capitalized first letter.

Examples of proper nouns:

Jack, London, Asia.

Proper nouns will usually be taught after regular nouns, as they require additional instruction to capitalize the first letter.

When introducing them, it can help to provide plenty of contrast between generic objects such as ‘ball, cat, house’ and specific nouns such as ‘Lucy, China, Nike’.

Verbs

Verbs describe an action, or the state of a subject. There are several categories of verbs that exist which we’ll cover later in this course.

Here are some simple verbs to start with:

Eat, sleep, jump, watch.
Think, feel, daydream.

One thing to note about verbs is that they often change to reflect time or duration – for example: eat/ate/eaten/eating. Because of this, they can be one of the more challenging parts of your students’ learning.

When teaching verbs it’s important to give clear examples to ensure that your students understand the action or state that’s being described. Key ways to do this can include acting out the verb, showing video clips, or clear images. It’s also a common practice to first teach the present tense of a verb, to avoid confusing students. Then afterwards introduce the past and future variations. 

To get beginners started with verbs, it can also help to pair their learning with a simple sentence structure such as ‘I like to…’ Or ‘I can…’. These sentences are immediately useful and give students a chance to practice the new verbs without having to worry about tenses.

Adjectives

Adjectives are used to describe nouns. They are useful for adding accuracy, interest, deeper information and imagination to communication.

Here are some examples of different types of adjectives:

Red, blue, yellow.
Hot, cold, windy.
Pretty, ugly, expensive.

New English learners will often start by learning colors as it’s simple to create a context for this kind of lesson, and it gives students a way to describe most objects and people.