Understanding Basic Sentence Structures

I had a lesson with someone who spoke broken English and I told her that it was in her interest to deconstruct and reconstruct her sentences so that she could be clearer speaker. The person gave me a sentence with an adverb of frequency, out of place. It was difficult to know whether she often went to France. The order of words in the French language is often different from the word order in English. This why I had her overlook the basic word order of a simple sentence. She was then able to appreciate how to construct a sentence by placing a word like often in the right place, using a subject at the beginning of the sentence and an object at the end. Otherwise our sentences would be a jumble of words and the listener would have difficulty understanding where the emphasis of the sentence really is or what the speaker intends the object to be.

Using the basic sentence structure well means the speaker has to be comfortable with the subject being at the beginning followed by the verb and then having an object at the end. The subject is the person or thing that the action is centred around, the verb puts the sentence into motion or gives life to the sentence and the object is generally the target of the action. Many people will want to start off talking in an inverted word order, where the object is found at the beginning of a sentence usually in the form of a prepositional phrase, because this is how they are used to hearing their native language. I would encourage them to learn and appreciate the basic word order first before twisting the sentence around.

Often enough problems in communicating arise because the listener has only learnt how to speak but has not had the opportunity to write down his assimilated information so that he can confirm what he heard. People are often too busy to take the time and see what they hear. Many people are also easily influenced by what they hear on the street and that can often be far from the standard form that is going to get them ahead in their career. This is where the person has to make some distinction between the slang he hears on the street (including words that are cut short and phonetically modified) informal English that he can use with friends and formal English that he might use as a distinctive speaker.

Often enough they don’t have the patience to examine the differences between different forms of a sentence like the passive and active voice. Knowing the differences would permit them to be more fluent in their speech as they would then be able to lay more emphasis on wither an object or a subject. When the person wants to give a command he is going to leave out the subject at the beginning and start his sentence with a verb. If the person is going to express doubt he is likely to add a tag at the sentence, which is often a reversal of the subject and verb found at the beginning of the sentence. Knowing these forms would then allow the speaker to associate the reason for his speech to a specific prompt. This is why knowing sentence structures are key to becoming a more efficient speaker.