Adult Literacy Core Curriculum - Nationally developed Skills for Life ...

Sample activities
• Increase their awareness of possible pronoun ambiguity by reading a story or an account of an
experience written by a young child where it is not always clear who or what the pronouns are
referring to. Annotate the text with a reader’s questions about its possible meaning. Amend the
text to make the meaning clear. Write down some advice to give the child about using pronouns.
• Read a copy of a newspaper article in which some of the nouns and pronouns have been
removed in the last paragraph. Re-write this paragraph with appropriate nouns and pronouns,
deciding where pronouns could be used and where a noun would be necessary to make the
meaning clear. In a pair, identify some guidelines for avoiding ambiguous pronouns in this type
of writing.
• Use 'Find and Replace' to substitute pronouns (my, her, his, our, their) for nouns.
• Reinforce and extend their knowledge and
use of punctuation by writing a
‘Punctuation serial’: the teacher writes the
first paragraph of a story without any
punctuation (based on two or three
characters likely to appeal to/amuse
learners); they punctuate the paragraph for
homework, discuss it in the next class and
suggest developments for Episode 2; the
teacher writes the paragraph up, and
learners punctuate it, and so on. The
teacher brings in more demanding
punctuation and more complex sentence
structures through the episodes.
• Establish punctuation routines in their own
writing, e.g.: place a post-it on the
page/screen as a reminder; always stop at
the end of a paragraph/section and re-read
for sense and punctuation; read aloud to
someone at home to spot omissions;
exchange work with another learner and
do a ‘punctuation check’ for each other;
identify their own ‘punctuation black spots’
to work on (e.g. check every its/it’s – could
it be replaced with it is? If so, it needs an
apostrophe).
Writing
Inverted commas, semi-colons, colons, dashes
Inverted commas largely relate to narrative writing or to quotations, so
can be practised in very specific contexts. Setting out direct speech is often
more of a challenge to learners than use of the speech marks themselves.
Semi-colons, colons and dashes can often be exemplified in texts such as
leaflets or brochures where single points are listed or bulleted from a
common stem. The semi-colon as a way of separating two complete short
‘sentences’ that are nonetheless closely related can help some learners to
break the habit of wrongly using commas in this context.
Apostrophes without tears?
Apostrophes relate closely to grammatical structure. The omissive
apostrophe signals a missing letter in contracted forms of words or
phrases associated with spoken language and informal writing, especially
in direct speech in narrative. Adults are more likely to ‘see the point’ of
them if they learn them in the context of less formal versions of full-form,
more formal equivalents. They also usefully fall into certain main
‘families’: negative verb forms (e.g. can’t/cannot, haven’t/have not,
shouldn’t/should not, etc.) and pronoun + verb combinations (e.g. I’m/I
am, you’re/you are, etc.).
Possessive apostrophes appear to baffle most of the country and produce
plenty of column inches per year in favour of their retention or
abandonment. The easiest form to teach is probably the –’s for singular
possessives: Fred’s feet, The Shakespeare’s Head Hotel; This bloke’s wife is
my sister. If the words can be re-framed as the something of something
(feet of Fred, etc.) then a possessive apostrophe is needed. If adults are also
taught explicitly about pluralisation and the role of –s/–es in making nouns
plural, they should have a reasonable chance of distinguishing the singular
–’s possessive from the plural –s.
The whole picture gets cloudier for many people when introduced to the
plural possessive –s’ form and to possessive pronouns, which (apparently
inconsistently) use an –s without an apostrophe (yours, hers, its, ours,
theirs). Sorting its and it’s should be simple enough: forget the possessive
angle altogether – if its can be substituted with it is then it’s it’s!
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