English Sentence StructureEnglish sentence structure, once learned, can help ESL students master the language. All parts of speech have particular duties they perform when they’re combined to form a sentence. Sometimes a verb doesn’t express action but a state of being, such as “The girl is a happy person.” Or sometimes the verb will be made up of two or three verbs that go together—-the main verb and some auxiliary or helping verbs, such as, “The girl is walking to school,” or, “The man has taken his car to work.” In these examples, “is walking” and “has taken” are the action words of the sentence and act as verb phrases. A subject and verb don’t always have to appear together in a sentence, as in: “The tiger in the mountains growled.” In this case, “in the mountains” is a prepositional phrase. In the sentence, “The spider usually bites,” the word ‘usually’ is the adverb describing the verb. A complete sentence must have two elements. It needs to contain a subject and a verb (or verb phrase), and it needs to be a complete thought. If a sentence doesn’t contain these two elements it isn’t complete and only a fragment or a phrase. Run-on sentences are two sentences which run together without a period, such as, “The girl walked to school, she was late when she got there.” These are two separate sentences with two complete thoughts and should be punctuated with a period after the first complete thought: “The girl walked to school. She was late when she got there.” A semicolon could also be used to repair this problem, such as, “The girl walked to school; she was late when she got there.” The more you read and write, the more you’ll see how easy it is to construct a sentence.
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