Lesson Note on English Language SS2 First Term
SCHEME OF WORK
WEEK 1: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: PARTS OF SPEECH REVISION
WEEK 2: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: ORACY SKILLS – PURE VOWELS, ARTICLES AND WRITING SKILLS
WEEK 3: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: DIPHTHONGS, DETERMINERS AND WRITING SKILL
WEEK 4: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: CONJUNCTIONS, FORMAL LETTERS AND POETRY
WEEK 5: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: CONSONANTS; SENTENCES; VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT
WEEK 6: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: WORD FORMS, INFORMAL LETTER AND WRITING EXPOSITION
WEEK 7: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: WORD STRESS, PUNCTUATION AND SPEECH WRITING.
WEEK 8: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY, ACTIVE/PASSIVE VOICE AND WORD STRESS
WEEK 9: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: NOMINALIZATION AND SKILL FOCUS (PARAPHRASING A POEM)
WEEK 10: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: NOMINALIZATION OF ADJECTIVES AND VERBS
WEEK 11: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: WORDS ASSOCIATED WITH HUMAN BODY SYSTEM AND FUNCTIONS
WEEK 12: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: RELATIVE PRONOUN: WHO, WHOSE, WHICH ETC; WORDS ASSOCIATED WITH BUILDING AND BUILDING CONSTRUCTION
WEEK 13: SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: SPEECH WORK: UNSTRESSED VOWELS
PLURAL FORMS OF NOUN (THE RULES)
SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: SPEECH WORK (ORAL): MAKING A TOAST DURING CELEBRATION; READING TO SUMMARIZE AN ARGUMENT
SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: WORD MODIFIERS (ADJECTIVAL AND ADVERBIAL)
SS2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE FIRST TERM: COMPLEX SENTENCES ANALYSIS: FEATURES OF COMPLEX SENTENCES
READING TO PARAPHRASE POEMS: KEYWORDS ASSOCIATED WITH DRAMATIC WORKS; PHRASAL VERBS WITH TWO PARTICLES
English Language Lesson Note For SS2 (First Term)
Below are the 2022 complete SS2 First Term English Language Lesson Note
Week 1
Contents:
Revision on Parts of Speech: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs, Conjunction, Verbs, Interjection, Pronoun.
Introduction
The indispensable aspect of a language you cannot ignore if you want to be an authority in the language is the Parts of Speech.
A part of speech is a category into which words are placed according to the functions they perform in a sentence. Every word that makes up a sentence, phrase or clause belongs to a part of speech.
Nouns
A noun is often defined as a word which names a person, place or thing. Here are some examples of nouns: boy, river, friend, Mexico, triangle, day, school, truth, university, idea, John F. Kennedy, movie, aunt, vacation, eye, dream, j7flag, teacher, class, grammar. John is a noun because it is the name of a person; Mexico is a noun because it is the name of a place, and boy is a noun because it is the name of a thing. Noun has different forms and functions. They are either proper or Improper. Common nouns are either countable or uncountable. To learn more, Click here
Week 2
Contents:
Oracy Skills: Pure Vowels – Short vowels and Long Vowels
Articles: Definite and Indefinite
Skill Focus: Writing
A. Pure Vowels: Short and Long Vowels
There are twelve pure vowels and eight diphthongs. Pure vowels are either short or long. Here are some examples; add more of your own.
Short Vowels
/i/ – boxing, ring, whistle
/e/ – net, medal, rest
/æ/ – fans, handball, athletics, match
/ɑ/ – hockey, volleyball
/∧/ – umpire, luck
/ʊ/ – football, push, put
/ə/ – better, tournament, loser
Long Vowels
/i:/ – team, arena, referee
/ɑ:/ – pass, basketball, sparring, partner
/ͻ:/ – ball, court, draw
/u:/ – boot, lose, shoes
/ɜ:/ – hurt, reserve
The symbols between the lines// represent sounds. These symbols are called phonetic symbols. To learn more, Click here
Week 3
Contents:
Oracy Skills: Diphthongs
Grammar: Determiners
Writing Skills: How to read and listen for gist
The Habit of Reading
A. Diphthongs
A Diphthong is a type of vowel that begins as one sound, then changes into another. (Note that di – is a prefix meaning ‘two’.) E.g. in the word ‘waist’, the sound /e/ is followed by the sound /i/ to produce /ei/sound.
| Sound | Example |
| /ei/ | Brain, lame |
| /ai/ | Eye, thigh |
| /ͻi/ | Voice, coin |
| /əʊ/ | Bone, nose |
| /aʊ/ | Aloud, mouth |
| /ie/ | Ear, fear |
| /eə/ | Hair, pair |
| /ʊə/ | Actual, factual To learn more, Click here |
Week 4
Contents:
Grammar: Conjunction
Essay Writing: Formal Letter
Poetry
A. Conjunctions
Conjunctions are words used as joiners. Conjunctions join related words, phrases, or clauses. A conjunction can be a word (and, because, but, or, etc) or a phrase (as though, as well as, in order that, so that). Think of them as glueing words. They glue words, phrases, and clauses together. There are three groups of conjunction:
Coordinating conjunctions join words, phrases, and clauses. Examples of coordinating conjunctions are and, but, for, nor, or, so, and yet. The most commonly used of these conjunctions are and and but. And connects similar ideas while but connects two contrasting ones. The conjunction or is used to show alternatives. To learn more, Click here
Week 5
Contents:
Oracy Skills: Consonants
Grammar: Sentences
Vocabulary Development
A. Consonant
A consonant is a speech sound made by partly or completely stopping the flow of air through the mouth. Examples are [p] pronounced with the lips; [t], pronounced with the front of the tongue; [k], pronounced with the back of the tongue; [h], pronounced in the throat; [f] and [s], pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (fricatives); and [m] and [n], which have air flowing through the nose (nasals).
Each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features:
- The manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives, and nasals.
- The place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved. Places include bilabial (both lips), alveolar(tongue against the gum ridge), and velar (tongue against soft palate). In addition, there may be a simultaneous narrowing at another place of articulation, such aspalatalisation or pharyngealisation.
- The phonation of a consonant is how the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. When the vocal cords vibrate fully, the consonant is called voiced; when they do not vibrate at all, it is voiceless.
- The voice onset time (VOT) indicates the timing of the phonation. Aspiration is a feature of VOT. To learn more, Click here
Week 6
Contents:
Grammar: Word Forms and degrees
Essay Writing : Informal Letter
Skill Focus: Writing an Exposition
A. Word Forms
Basic Word Order
English word order is strict and rather inflexible. As there are few endings in English that show person, number, case and tense, English relies on word order to show relationships between words in a sentence.
English nouns do not have any case endings (only personal pronouns have some case endings), so it is mostly the word order that tells us where things are in a sentence, and how they interact. Compare:
The girl stares at the boy.
The boy stares at the girl.
The subject and the object in these sentences are completely the same in form. How do you know who stares at whom? The rules of English word order tell us about it.
A sentence is a group of words containing a subject and a predicate and expressing a complete thought. Word order arranges separate words into sentences in a certain way and indicates where to find the subject, the predicate, and the other parts of the sentence such as the verb, adjective, adverb, and conjunction. Word order and context help to identify the meanings of individual words in a sentence.
English sentences are divided into declarative sentences (statements), interrogative sentences (questions), imperative sentences (commands, requests), and exclamatory sentences. Declarative sentences are the most common type of sentence. Word order in declarative sentences serves as a basis for word order in the other types of sentences. To learn more, Click here
Week 7
Contents:
Word Stress
Grammar: Punctuation
Skill Focus: Speech Writing
Vocabulary Development: Army Word Register
A. WORD STRESS
Five Syllable Stress
Let us practise some words with five syllables beginning with those having stress on the first or the second syllable. Read the following, giving the stress as indicated by the capital letters:
REgionalism
CAPitalism
NAtionalism
unCOMfortable
exAMinable
conSUMerism
afFECtionately
parTICularly
Rules of Stress
It is not easy to lay down rules of stress, to know in advance which syllable to stress. These guidelines will help:
- Many words are made up of a ROOT (or ‘base’), plus one or more AFFIXES (prefixes before the root, suffixes after the root). In other words, each syllable of a word is either a root or it is an affix. A root may be common to several words. For example: inform, conform, reform, formal all contain the root FORM.
- Generally, a root carries primary stress; affixes do not. However, there are exceptions to these rules: In words with the suffix -ation or -ition, the -a- or -i- of this suffix is stressed: for example, investiGAtion, repeTItion.
- Some suffixes (e.g. -ic, -ity) cause the syllable before the suffix to be stressed. Compare eCOnomy (second-syllable stress) with ecoNOmic (third -syllable stress). To learn more, Click here
Week 8
Contents:
Essay Writing: Argumentative Essay
Grammar: Active and Passive Voice
Oracy Skills: Word Stress
Figures of Speech
A. Skill Focus
How to Write an Argumentative Essay
I. General Approach
Two things need to be planned out:
a. The arguments – for and against. We call these the pros and the cons
b. The relevant facts
The skill comes in developing your arguments, and in supporting them in a logical way by the facts.
II. Method
1. Make sure that you have read and understood the question. In particular, check whether you are required to develop only one side of the case, or whether you are required to consider both the pros and the cons. Usually, you will be asked to argue for or against a point of view.
2. Jot down in note form all the relevant arguments you can think of.
3. Decide which arguments seem stronger, and try to form your own opinion
4. Plan you essay. Rearrange the arguments under the headings For and Against (or Pro and Con), and jot down next to each one any relevant facts that you can think of. In your plan consider, and then demolish the arguments you disagree with first. Here is an example;
a) Introduction
b) Pros (arguments for X)
c) Cons (arguments against X; it may be that you are mentioning them in order to attack them!)
d) Conclusion To learn more, Click here
Week 9
Contents:
Grammar: Nominalization
Vocabulary Development: The Human Body
Skill Focus: Writing Skills
A. Grammar: Nominalization
It is useful to expand your vocabulary and one way to do this to know how to use suffixes to form new words. A suffix is something we add to the end of a word to change its meaning or grammatical status. The use of these suffixes to change the meaning of words is called Nominalization. Many nouns are derived from other words and these words maybe adjectives or verbs.
E.g.
we can add the word -hood to some nouns to form an abstract noun: man – manhood, child – childhood.
In some other cases we can add -ship to form an abstract noun: leader – leadership, scholar – scholarship
More commonly nouns can be formed from adjectives. The commonest way is by adding -ness: good – goodness, kind – kindness
In linguistics, nominalization is the use of a word which is not a noun (e.g. a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation. The term can also refer specifically to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech via the addition of derivational affixes (e.g., legalize versus legalization) To learn more, Click here
What is Nominalisation?
Nominalisation is the use of a word which is not a noun (e.g. a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation. The term can also refer specifically to the process of producing a noun from another part of speech via the addition of derivational affixes (e.g., legalize versus legalization).
Some languages simply allow verbs to be used as nouns, while others require some form of morphological transformation. English has cases of both.
Two types of nominalisation are found in English. One type requires the addition of a derivational suffix to create a noun. In other cases, English uses the same word as a noun without any additional morphology. This second process is referred to as zero-derivation.
Examples of nouns formed from adjectives:
- applicability (from applicable)
- carelessness (from careless)
- difficulty (from difficult)
- intensity (from intense)
Relative Pronoun Defined
A relative pronoun is a type of pronoun that often introduces dependent (or relative) clauses in sentences. They also can stand alone as the subject or object of a sentence. There is a specific list of relative pronouns, and here they are: who, whoever, whom, whomever, that, which, when, where, and whose. (Sometimes, what, which, and where can serve as relative pronouns.)
Why Are Relative Pronouns Important?
Relative pronouns introduce relative clauses, which is a group of words that has both a subject and a verb and modifies a noun in a sentence. Without the relative pronoun, the relative clause would not exist. In fact, the relative pronoun is a ‘clue’ word to let us know that the relative clause is beginning.
Examples of Relative Pronouns in Sentences
Here are two examples of how relative pronouns are used in sentences. Let’s start with the simple sentence:
The fly landed.
Now let’s build it up with a relative clause: To learn more, Click here
Vocabulary Development: Words Associated with the Human Body and Functions
How much do you know about the human body? The box below contains a list of organs of the body and their definitions mis-matched. Match the organ with its correct definition
| 1. | Heart | a. | The strong muscular organ in which the developing baby grows inside the mother |
| 2. | Kidneys | b. | The organ where food digestion begins to take place |
| 3. | Lungs | c. | Organ in the chest which pumps blood through the body |
| 4. | Bones | d. | A large organ in the body which helps to digest food and cleans your blood |
| 5. | Uterus | e. | The organ in your lower back that separates waste liquid from your blood and creates urine..
|
The unstressed vowel
One of the hardest things about spelling words with more than one syllable is managing the unstressed vowel.The unstressed vowel is the little “uh” sound we say in “weak” syllables, like the “er” in “water”, the “ar” in “liar”, the “or” in “tractor” or the “a” in “China”. It can be spelt using just about any vowel spelling.
If learners are introduced to long words too quickly, before they have grasped the major vowel spellings in one-syllable words, they can think that this vowel is an “u” sound as in “cut”.
This can make them very confused about how to spell this sound, and how to spell long words generally, since this sound seems to be everywhere in long words.
Another thing which can be really confusing when learning to spell words with more than one syllable is identifying syllable boundaries.
A syllable can be just one letter, or it can be half a dozen or more. Learners need to familiarise themselves with which patterns indicate the end of a syllable, and how to munch their way through long words just one mouthful/syllable at a time, not try to swallow words whole. To learn more, Click here
Plural Forms of Noun and the Rules Guiding them
In English, we form the plurals of nouns by adding –s to the singular. Examples are given below.
Boy -> boys
Girl -> girls
Book -> books
There are several exceptions to this rule. Nouns ending in –s, -sh, -ch and –x, form their plurals by adding –es to the singular.
Examples are:
Box -> boxes
Class -> classes
Branch -> branches
