This online course has been retired / is no longer available. It has been replaced by Grammar: Participants - nouns and the noun group for expressing ideas, a self-paced online course by Professor Beverly Dereiwanka (A New Grammar Companion for Teachers). View the full course description and register your place.

Looking for more teacher professional courses supporting best-practice English and literacy instruction? Browse the full PETAA course catalogue.

Nouns are often introduced as simple naming words, but in authentic texts they do far more than label. In Grammar: Participants – nouns and the noun group for expressing ideas, teachers explore how noun groups carry and build meaning by identifying who or what is involved in a text.

Grounded in a functional grammar approach, this course focuses on how participants are constructed, expanded and refined to create clarity, precision and depth. Teachers will examine how noun groups can be developed through carefully chosen premodifiers and postmodifiers, and how these choices shift depending on purpose, audience and genre.

Through rich text examples and practical classroom applications, the course supports teachers to move beyond basic identification and towards helping students craft more sophisticated noun groups — enabling them to describe, specify and evaluate with increasing control in their writing.

Learning outcomes:

• Identify participants in sentences by recognising who or what is involved in an activity
• Analyse how participants function in different roles (e.g. actors, sayers, sensers) within a clause
• Distinguish between noun types, including countable and uncountable nouns, and explain how these shape meaning
• Expand noun groups using effective premodifiers and postmodifiers to increase clarity and precision
• Differentiate between functional and evaluative describers and support students to use each deliberately
• Analyse how noun groups vary across text types and how different genres support increasing complexity
• Evaluate student writing by identifying simple, expanded and deliberately crafted noun groups
• Design teaching approaches that support students to build more precise, detailed and purposeful participant groups in their writing