Students' tacit pronoun knowledge
Helps you teach rules of English grammar

The rules of English grammar say:

• A pronoun should agree in person and number with its antecedent.

• Make sure readers know which noun the pronoun replaces.

Before they can obey those rules, students need to understand the concept of a pronoun.

English language and linguistics expert Rei I. Noguchi says native English speakers know the concept of a pronoun. He says pronoun agreement is one of the rules of English grammar that native speakers learn intuitively.

In fact, he uses students' tacit knowledge of the rules of English grammar to teach native English speaking students the formal grammar they need to become competent writers. He starts with pronouns. Pronouns open the gate to identifying subjects of sentences.

Warning: This process is not for use with students whose first language is not English. Your grammar strategies need to be appropriate to the students you are teaching.

Tag makes pronoun eye its noun

Noguchi starts by giving students a series of declarative sentences, like this one:

Cats and dogs are natural enemies.

Then he has students add a tag to the end of each one, like this:

Cats and dogs are natural enemies, aren't they?

The tag turns the statement into a question by asking whether the assertion of the statement is correct.

Without any instruction in correct grammar, native English speakers naturally make the pronoun in the tag agree in person and number with the subject of the sentence.

Students don't have to know the grammatical terms to be able to frame the tags. Even when the subject is not an ordinary noun, students usually have no difficulty telling what pronoun would replace it. For example,

Reading poetry isn't one of Harold's favorite leisure-time activities.

Could become,

Reading poetry isn't one of Harold's favorite leisure-time activities, is he?

But that makes no sense to native English speakers. The only tag that makes sense is in this sentence:

Reading poetry isn't one of Harold's favorite leisure-time activities, is it?

The word or words that identify

• A person or person

• A place or places

• A thing or things

that the pronoun in the tag replaces is either a noun or group of words functioning as a noun.

Noguchi says students rarely substitute a pronoun for a verb, adjective, or any other part of speech than a noun. They may, however, make usage errors (such as them instead of they), but that's different from not understanding the concept of pronoun use.

Since the subject of a sentence is either a noun or words functioning as a noun, Noguchi's technique for identifying the primary noun in a sentence is the first step toward finding the subject of a sentence.

You could do this activity orally with upper elementary students, couldn't you? You could get by with almost no grammatical terminology, if .........

Instead of saying singular say one person or one thing

Instead of saying plural say more than one person or more than one thing

Instead of saying pronoun say a word that points to other words that mean a person, place, or a thing, even to things that we can't see or touch.