Grammar for ielts writing a handbook by David S. Wills Contents

Parts of Speech
Introduction
One of the key IELTS skills that all students know is that you need a large vocabu-
lary. But how do you learn new words? Most importantly, you don’t learn them 
in isolation. You learn collocations, which means 
how words work together
. You 
need to learn how to use a word or else knowing it is useless. Thus, it is essential 
that you know the different parts of speech in order to succeed in IELTS.
Through this book, I will talk about verbs and nouns, adverbs and adjectives, 
and prepositions and conjunctions. These are some of the parts of speech that 
make up the English language, and it is important that you know what the words 
mean. Therefore, in this first chapter, I will explain the parts of speech so that you 
can understand the book better. If you already know this stuff extensively, you 
may skip this chapter and begin with Chapter Two. 
C H A P T E R
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The 8 Parts of Speech
In the English language, all words can be broken down into eight categories. They are:
1. nouns
2. verbs
3. adjectives
4. adverbs
5. prepositions
6. conjunctions
7. pronouns
8. interjections
Some people argue that articles (a/an/the) are a separate category called ar-
ticles or determiners; however, you can include these as a sort of adjective. In 
most textbooks, they list 8 parts of speech, so that’s what we will use here to 
avoid confusion.
We will look at these in more depth after we ask an important question: 
Why Learn Parts of Speech for IELTS?
In order to do well in IELTS, you need to have a good knowledge of English. That’s 
pretty obvious, right? But how can you know the language well unless you know 
its basic structure? If you want to learn new words, you need to know how to use 
them. You should know some really basic things like:
„
adjectives add detail to nouns
„
adverbs give more information about verbs
„
pronouns replace nouns
It is tremendously important that you understand these basics so that you 
can then develop more advanced skills. In English, we have a saying:
“You need to walk before you can run.”
This is true of language, too. If you want to speak English at an IELTS 7 level, 
you have to work your way up from the basics. I often tell my students that they