How would you describe your best friend? Would you say he or she is kind? Does this person always treat people with great kindness? Does your friend always behave kindly in all the majority of situations? And have you ever seen this person be unkind? Here we’ve used the word kind, which is an adjective in different ways, as a noun, as an adverb and even with a negative prefix. To achieve a good level of English, you’ll have to be pretty good at noticing how a word is used or the type of word you will need to complete a sentence. You’ll also need to have a good knowledge on the use of prefixes and suffixes in order to change words from one class to another or even give them a negative meaning. The bad news is that there are quite a few rules and also quite a few exceptions to these rules, but the good news is that through practice, you’ll eventually achieve a reasonable degree of skill for this type of activity.

Every now and then, I’ll try to place some activities on the blog to cover this part of learning English. Please don’t leave this type of content until the day before your exams, as it is only through practice that word formation samples ‘will stick’.

Here’s an activity related to words that we could use to describe people’s characters and they way in which they behave.

Click here for grammar slide

Click here for word formation activity