Page 93 - The national curriculum in England - Framework document

English

Term Guidance Example

preposition A preposition phrase has a He was in bed.
phrase preposition as its head followed by a I met them after the party.
noun, pronoun or noun phrase.

present tense Verbs in the present tense are Jamal goes to the pool every day.
commonly used to: [describes a habit that exists now]

 talk about the present He can swim. [describes a state
 talk about the future. that is true now]

They may take a suffix –s The bus arrives at three.
(depending on the subject). [scheduled now]
See also tense. My friends are coming to play.
[describes a plan in progress now]

progressive The progressive (also known as the Michael is singing in the store
‘continuous’) form of a verb generally room. [present progressive]
describes events in progress. It is Amanda was making a patchwork
formed by combining the verb’s quilt. [past progressive]
present participle (e.g. singing) with
a form of the verb be (e.g. he was Usha had been practising for an
singing). The progressive can also hour when I called. [past perfect
be combined with the perfect (e.g. he progressive]
has been singing).

pronoun Pronouns are normally used like Amanda waved to Michael.
nouns, except that:
She waved to him.
 they are grammatically more
specialised John’s mother is over there. His
mother is over there.
 it is harder to modify them
The visit will be an overnight visit.
In the examples, each sentence is This will be an overnight visit.
written twice: once with nouns, and
once with pronouns (underlined). Simon is the person: Simon broke
Where the same thing is being talked it. He is the one who broke it.
about, the words are shown in bold.

punctuation Punctuation includes any “I’m going out, Usha, and I won’t
conventional features of writing other be long,” Mum said.
than spelling and general layout: the
standard punctuation marks . , ; : ? !
- – ( ) “ ” ‘ ’ , and also word-spaces,
capital letters, apostrophes,
paragraph breaks and bullet points.
One important role of punctuation is
to indicate sentence boundaries.

Received Received Pronunciation (often
Pronunciation abbreviated to RP) is an accent
which is used only by a small

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