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Teaching ESL Grammar How Words are Constructed
By:John Olander

Words are constructed in different ways and students must understand the basic concepts of exactly how phrases are usually built to generate significance. So in this posting let me write about just a few ways phrases that tend to be built conjointly. To get an idea of how we may add to phrases and build distinct meanings we will need to look at the most basic component of meaning inside a word which is called a morpheme. For the purpose of this short article we will evaluate the morpheme “pay” and find out its different word constructs.

A functional prefix brings significance towards a word simply by fixing its affix prior to a morpheme. A few examples of affixes are auto, pre, con, en, de, ex, sub, trans, retro, micro, per, ad, sur, or super. The morpheme “pay” can also add multiple prefixes such as pre-pay, reimburse, or auto-pay. Those are only a few of most likely a lot more possibilities. Essentially a prefix can transform the interpretation of a word entirely.

A suffix contributes definition towards a word by means of attaching an affix following a morpheme. Examples of suffixes are ics, ology, cide, ism, ist, ia, ic, tic, ment and probably countless others. The morpheme “pay” can add the particular suffix “ment” to make “payment.” Suffixes affect the meaning of words too!

Compound words do precisely what you are reasoning; they compound a pair of words jointly to produce a distinctive meaning. We're able to add the word “check” to the primary morpheme and produce the word “paycheck.”

Idioms have symbolic meaning which unfortunately are not to be understood literally as they are expressions perceived only by way of prevalent use. For any idiom to become undeniably an idiom each individual word separated inside of it shouldn’t appear sensible in the intended meaning. For example, the idiom “pay an arm and a leg” means to pay quite a lot of money. Why this a accurate idiom is that the word arm doesn’t indicate “a lot” nor does the word leg, but the idiom “pay and arm and leg” means to pay lots of money. It's estimated that you will find over 25,000 of these within the English language and lots of ESL learners have difficulties because there are just too many of these. A student must be quite committed to comprehend or get better at idioms.

Collocations are typically misconstrued as being idioms, but they are not. Collocations are terms that when broken down by individual words would continue to reflect the actual significance associated with what could be wanting to end up being explained. As an example, ‘pay attention’ is not really an idiom since the word pay suggests to give. Pay attention demonstrates the literal meaning of offer your attention.

John Olander started his esl career teaching in korea http://eslasiaguide.com/ and is still currently an esl instructor there. In addition to his full-time job he is working at ESL Asia Guide and helping teachers locate esl jobs, view and post local Asian classifieds, share esl lesson plans and build a better expat community in Asia: http://esljobs.eslasiaguide.com/





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