At the ATEG 2000 Conference, we were asked to submit a lesson for students we teach.  I had no white paper to write upon and no printer with my laptop, so I let the conference expire without submitting my lesson.  But here it is for those of you who might be interested in such late stuff.
 
This lesson is early in the semester in my college "Grammar for Teachers" course.  Notice the "whole language" attributes of the lesson.  It deals with the application of only seven terms using text that the students invent or discover for themselves in groups and individually.  The concepts involved are broad, not restricted by prescriptive definitions.  We become narrower and more analytical as the semester progresses.

Basic Sentence Pattern Constituents

Jeff Glauner

I use in this chapter a word used commonly by the structuralist (formalist) grammarians: constituents. Constituents are the pieces that make up sentences. In this chapter I will give you the names of the constituents that make up basic sentence patterns. Remember that other grammarians might name them differently or include more or fewer of them. Don’t worry about it. That’s another thing that makes grammar study warm and fuzzy. Also, remember that there are other constituents which we will examine later that are used to elaborate basic sentence patterns .

1. Subject Noun Phrase
2. Predicate Verb Phrase
3. Verb
4. Direct Object
5. Indirect Object
6. Subject Complement
7. Object Complement

That’s the list. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as that. There are several kinds of each one of the above, and several syntactic structures can fill the role of each of them.

You probably don’t know yet how to identify all of the basic sentence constituents in any sentence. Don’t worry about that yet. I hope that you can identify some of them on a regular basis and most of them occasionally. By the end of our study, I want you to be able to identify all of them on a fairly regular basis. (We all get confused by some of them in some situations.)

For today, I want you to get back into your groups from last class period. Give your group another day even if it didn’t go so well last time. In your groups, I want you to write sentences in which you can identify the constituents above. I’d like you to write one sentence for each constituent. Everybody in the group should make a copy of what you write. Underline the constituent and write the name of the constituent beside the sentence like this:

1) The fat woman has sung. (Subject Noun Phrase)

You can’t use this one. Come up with your own. You can use the stack of handbooks I brought in, or you can just patch into your own communal genius. You have ten minutes.

* * *

There! I presume that was easy. Now let’s report. Each group give us one sentence at a time. Then we’ll take a closer look. We might want to write some on the board. I’ll probably fill in some gaps with my own feeble constructions.

Assignment for submission next class period: Write enough sentences (none that you saw today) to make it possible for you to show an example of each of the constituents listed above. Feel free to look up examples in handbooks. I don’t expect that you will fully understand your examples, just that you begin to recognize them (and can name them) when you see them. This is only the beginning of your study of sentence constituents. You will have a great deal of time to master them more fully. Indeed, you will have the rest of your life to do so. Learn as much as you can this semester.