How to Explain Pronouns to an ESL Person

An ESL person is a person that uses English as a second language. When educating an ESL person about English and why English words are used the way that they are, the subject of pronouns is an important topic to broach. A pronoun is a word used in place of a noun so that sentences and speech flow nicely together rather than sound choppy and awkward. For an ESL person, explaining the use of a pronoun could be more difficult than explaining other parts of speech.

Instructions

    • 1

      Explain subject pronouns, which are used as predicate nouns or subject nouns. Subject pronouns are "it," "they," "we," "you," "he," "she" and "I." These pronouns are used to change the structure of a sentence when talking about a person. For example, "Jim went to the store and Jim bought four cookies" sounds better when you replace the second mention of Jim's name with a pronoun -- that is, "Jim went to the store and he bought four cookies."

    • 2

      Provide an example of an object pronoun, which is a pronoun used to explain an indirect or direct object or an object of preposition. Object pronouns are "us," "it," "me," "you," "them," "him" and "her." To use an object pronoun in a sentence you could take the sentence "Jane made Jim a card" and change it to "Jane made him a card."

    • 3

      Explain possessive pronouns, which are used to show possession of an object and take the place of nouns used in a possessive manner. "Mine," "my," "ours," "theirs," "yours," "his," "hers" and "its" are possessive pronouns. If Jim is talking to Jane and says "Jim's socks are taller than Jane's socks," it sounds awkward and strange. The way to make that sentence sound better is to replace the nouns with possessive pronouns so that Jim says to Jane, "My socks are taller than yours."

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