Parts of speech refers to the grammatical groups that words are divided into based on their usage. In this post, we'll identify the parts of speech that are emphasised most in Linguaskill's Reading & Listening test and tell you how you should prepare for them.
In English, information is communicated by using words arranged in a certain order, depending on what the information is and how the information is being communicated.
To demonstrate this, let's look at example sentence 1 below.
Example Sentence 1
SarahNoun
drinksVerb
milk.Noun
The sentence "Sarah drinks milk" contains 2 parts of speech: Nouns and Verbs. "Sarah" and "milk" are nouns, and "drinks" is a verb.
The two nouns and one verb are arranged in the basic sentence structure, i.e. grammar, of subject action object. We'll look at grammar in another post, so for now let's keep our focus on parts of speech.
Besides Nouns and Verbs, there are other parts of speech that we commonly use.
Look at example sentence 2.
Example Sentence 2
Sarah
drinks
coldAdjective
milk
quickly.Adverb
Example sentence 2 introduces two new parts of speech: Adjectives and Adverbs. In this sentence, the word "cold" is an adjective and "quickly" is an adverb.
Because we've added more information to example sentence 1, we now know that the milk is cold (and not hot) and Sarah is drinking it quickly (and not slowly).
Besides Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, and Adverbs, here are two more parts of speech that you'll need to know.
Look at example sentence 3.
Example Sentence 3
Sarah
drinks upVerb Phrase
herPronoun
cold
milk
quickly.
Example sentence 3 introduces another two new parts of speech: Phrasal Verb (or Verb Phrase) and Pronouns. In this sentence, the phrase "drinks up" is a verb phrase and "her" is a pronoun.
Keep this in mind as we'll need to use these later.
Prepositions. These are words like "in", "at", "on", "by", "of", "to", "next to", "above", "below", and "since" that are used to add information about positions, directions, places, time, and description of things.
Look at example sentence 4.
Example Sentence 4
Sarah
drinks
up
her
cold
milk
quickly
beforePreposition
bedtime.
In example sentence 4, the word "before" is a preposition as it tells us the time when the action is occurring (before bedtime, not during or after it).
(And in case you were wondering, "bedtime" is another Noun, and "before bedtime" is a Prepositional Phrase.)
We can provide even more information by joining clauses or sentence together using conjunctions. Conjunctions are words like "and", "but", "while", "since", "or", and "yet".
Look at example sentence 5.
Example Sentence 5
Sarah
drinks
up
her
cold
milk
quickly
before
bedtime
whileConjunction
she
is
in
theArticle
kitchen.
In example sentence 5, the word "while" is a conjunction joining the previous sentence with a new clause "she is in the kitchen".
Example sentence 5 also introduces an Article: "the". An Article is a parts of speech that functions as a quantifier for nouns.
Parts of speech is tested in the Reading section. All gapped sentence, multiple-choice gap-fill, and open gap-fill questions in the Reading section test one or more parts of speech.
Not all parts of speech are equally tested, as the Reading sections emphasises certain parts of speech over others. They can be categorised into two groups:
To improve core parts of speech, study the test guides:
To improve dynamic parts of speech, study the test guides:
