John,

Some tips on identifying clauses and independent clauses -- separating
subject and predicate is a first step to telling whether something is a
clause or not, and then finding the verb for later tests.

Always start with simpler sentences with normal subject-verb-everything
else order, then move on to variations.

1) Subject finding via tag questions:

Students know how to form tag questions. Give them a base sentence like
a., and ask them to add a tag, as in b. Model this once, then they
should get it.

a. Your mother is a surgeon.
b. Your mother is a surgeon, isn't she?  ("isn't she" is the TAG; b. is
a tag question.)

Take the pronoun in the tag (if the term "pronoun" is a problem, just
make a list of all the subject pronouns on the board, and students can
look for the one they use to make the tag).

Take that pronoun and use it as an "eraser" in the base sentence (a.).
Make sure you erase whatever is needed to keep the sentence sounding
sensible:

a. Your mother is a surgeon.
c. She is a surgeon.  "she" erases "your mother" -- it doesn't just
erase "mother", as "your she is a surgeon" is not grammatical.

Expand the subject slowly:

a. The children in the preschool make paper dolls in the afternoon,
don't they?
b. They make paper dolls ... (not "they in the preschool").

Once the subject is found, in most cases, the rest of the sentence is
the predicate.

When working with "transformed" (non-basic word order) sentences,
restore basic order:

c. In the afternoon, the children in the preschool make paper dolls.  --
restore to a. before looking for subject. Notice that this also helps
isolate the prep. phrase.

Finding verbs: tell students to look for the word that they can change
between present and past. Start with one-verb sentences:

a. Your mother is/was a surgeon.
b. The President vetos/vetoed the bills.

Working with auxiliary verbs, ask students where they would put "not";
then the aux is in front of "not", the main verb after:

c. The President has NOT vetoed the bills.

Start with sentences that have no intervening adverb, unlike:

d. The President has consistently vetoed the bills.

Eventually, make students aware of those. They can test them as adverb
vs. part of the verb phrase by moving them around:

e. The President has vetoed the bills consistently.   works but
f. The President has consistently the bills  vetoed. does not

They can then determine whether something is a clause or not by looking
for a subject and predicate that go together. (I define clause as having
a subject and predicate; I don't call participial phrases such as
"looking frantically around" clauses, just to make it easier to detect
clauses).

Sentence completeness:   You have to start with shorter sentences to do
this, and it is also best to restore basic order to a "transformed"
sentence:

a. Remove "and, or, but, neither, nor" if the sentence starts with that.
Do not remove anything other than these words.
b. Put the sentence in the blank after "that" in:
I am convinced that ____.  DO NOT CHANGE ANY WORDING IN THE TEST FRAME
OR THE SENTENCE BEING TESTED apart from removing "and, but", etc.

I) I am convined that your mother is a surgeon.  works
ii) I am convinced that your mother being a surgeon.  doesn't work.
iii) I am convinced that vetoing the bills. doesn't work
iv) I am convinced that because the President vetoed the bills. doesn't
work.

Students will be able to judge these just by their subconscious
knowledge of English; it's a quick thumbs-up or -down judgment. WILL
ONLY WORK FOR NATIVE OR NEAR-NATIVE SPEAKERS!!!!

As your students get practice with simpler sentences in basic order, you
can work with ever longer and more-complicated sentences, including ones
in real text.

My definition for "sentence" (which will, so far as I know, agree with
every K-12 pedagogical grammar out there) is: A sentence is a string
that contains at least one subject-predicate pair, that has one
tense-marked (present, past or future) verb, and that passes the "I am
convinced that" test. (Actually, the tensed verb criterion is
dispensable, since strings without one will not pass the "I am convinced
that" test).

Perhaps you do this already, but I believe that, in working with their
own writing, students should:

a - start with pieces of only one or two paragraphs.
b - look for different things in multiple passes -- one pass for
"incomplete sentences", one for subj-verb agreement, etc.

They can edit longer pieces as they become fluent with the shorter ones.

Your ideas for making the class fun are terrific. Teachers and language
experts need to work together. Teachers are often better at creative
lesson plans, and also are better at knowing what their students can
handle. The language experts can explain the grammar and provide tricks
like the above.

Let me know what you think of these tricks.

***************************************************
Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. 805-756-2184 ~ Dept. phone 805-756-2596
Dept. fax: 805-756-6374 ~  E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
***************************************************

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