Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Teaching Strategies

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VELS level 1 & 2 – Adding on information: noun groups

This section includes information on noun groups and the different tools used to compress information into them.

Purpose: compressing information in text

(head word)
Plants

(pre-modifiers)
The tropical plants

(post-modifiers)
The tropical plants from Port Douglas

Elaboration on nouns

Nouns and compressing information

One of the key resources that written language uses to ‘pack in’ information is the noun group.

In any noun group, the central or core word is the noun or ‘thing’. We can therefore call it the head word.

In this example, the noun and head word is ‘plants’. We can also expand its meaning by adding words before it and after it.

A group of words have been added: ‘the tropical’ before the head word ‘plants’. They are pre-modifiers. That is, they modify the meaning of the head noun by making it more specific. So we are no longer referring to any plants, we are now referring to ‘the tropical plants.’

Pre-modifiers often contain an article (‘the’ or ‘a’). The function of the article is to point to what is under focus in the noun group.

The article (‘the’ or ‘a’) will typically be followed by a describing word or an adjective. This commonly describes the physical appearance of the noun (‘tropical’) but there are also other choices.

It can, for example, give the writer’s emotional reaction to the head word or noun (e.g. ‘exquisite’: the ‘exquisite’ tropical plants). Another choice for the pre-modifying adjective is to classify the head word (e.g. ‘pandanus’: the tropical ‘pandanus’ plants). If we were to take up all of these choices, we could write a very long pre-modifier, for example, ‘the exquisite tropical pandanus plants’. As we have just seen, these basic resources are very useful for compressing information in writing.

Noun groups also have another resource for compressing information, the post-modifier. Post-modifiers, as their name suggests, come after the noun. They come in groups of words such as ‘from Port Douglas’. They can also be embedded clauses (e.g. which flourish in Far North Queensland).

The basic resources of pre and post modification are essential in building up information in writing and as children grow older, they need to have access to good models of these in both their reading and writing. Students can also be taught to observe these things in written texts and encouraged to play with them in their own writing by adding pre and post modifiers to nouns in order to build meanings in ways characteristic of literate language.

Students could select an object from their immediate surroundings and build up a description of it, for example, the chair; the small chair; the small blue chair; the small blue plastic chair; the small blue plastic chair that is sitting in the corner.