“Subject + verb” or “subject + predicate”, which is confusing to students?
When we talk about a sentence, we tell our ESL students that a sentence should have a subject and a verb (subject + verb). This confuses our students. When we talk about parts of speech, we tell them that we have different kinds of words — nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. When we talk about sentences, we also use the word “verb” to mean sentence elements. In my classes, when I did that, I found many students were confused. They thought I was talking about parts of speech of the words, not sentence elements. I realized that I should use “subject + predicate” instead of “subject + verb” when I talk about sentence elements. I explain to them that we usually use a noun or a pronoun as a subject, a verb for predicate, and a noun or a pronoun for object. When I explained it this way, I found my students understood better what I was talking about. I think we’d better not use the word “verb” to mean a sentence element while teaching grammar. We need to use “subject + predicate” instead of “subject + verb,” even though “predicate” is a hard-to-remember grammar term for our students. -Ron Lee