James - 100 English Sentence Structures for Speaking Fluency

100 English Sentence Structures for Speaking Fluency (Vol. 1)

by Dr Nick James

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Copyright 2022 Dr Nick James

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission contact:

Special thanks to Alberto Llinares Serra and Avian Daly for their supervision of this book.

1st Edition

Contents

About the author

Please read me

Hello and welcome! On my website , you can find an up-to-date list of links to the resources I mention in this book along with many others.

Is this book for me?

This book is for adult English language learners at the upper-intermediate level. It is especially for those of you who understand a lot of English, but have difficulty speaking fluently, accurately, and/or confidently. Even if you have an advanced level of English, you may still find the book useful (for my advanced students, it usually is).

What are sentence structures?

Sentence structures are continuous or discontinuous sequences of words that native English speakers often use when they speak. Examples include:

Come to think of it...

How come you?

To have looked at

Id hate to...

Do you happen to?

If it hadnt been for

Would it kill you?

Its too bad that

To what extent?

To arrange for to

Why should you learn sentence structures ?

About the 100 sentence structures

In the following pages, you will find 100 sentence structures along with examples of usage taken from spoken English . The structures are accompanied, where necessary, by short notes (marked with ) to aid understanding.

All sentence structures are widely used by native speakers .

Please note that even if the sentence structures and their examples use a certain pronoun in this book, this doesnt mean that they can only be used with that pronoun. For instance, Id better can also be Youd better, Shed better, etc.. Also, note that although the structures are presented with a particular meaning , they may also have other meanings in some cases.

How to work with the sentence structures

Youre almost ready to get started. Below are my recommendations for working with each structure in order to learn it.

These recommendations also apply even if youre already familiar with the structure; you may be familiar with it but still use less accurate and/or longer structures or even not know how to use it correctly (e.g. put it in the wrong part of the sentence).

If you already use the sentence structure (or use a similar one) in your speech correctly , try completing Steps 1 and 2 below anyway, for good measure.

Step

Read all 3 examples. This should help you (better) understand the sentence structures meaning and/or usage or learn something new about it, provided that you already use it in your speech (e.g. a new position within a sentence or a new phrase that you can use before or after it).

If the meaning or use of the structure is unclear after looking at the notes and examples, I recommend looking for more examples of the use of the sentence structure. That generally solves the issue. To do this, you can use Corpora (links on my website ), or type the sentence structure in Google in inverted commas to see the structure in use in website descriptions. Heres an example of Id hate to:

Sometimes it might be useful to skip the first few results if the structure matches the title of a song, film, etc. as you may not find many useful examples in the site descriptions.

Depending on the structure, you may also be able to find videos on social media or articles on the Internet that explain it in more detail. Some structures may even be discussed in English dictionaries . If so, they usually appear as the first results in a Google search (you may not need to write them in inverted commas for this).

In any case, in most cases, you'll most likely not need to do any further investigation once you've read the 3 examples.

Step 2

Choose one of the 3 examples and ask yourself the following question: Would I also have used this structure if I were making this sentence?

If you would have used the sentence structure in question (or a similar one), you can move to the next sentence structure and skip Step 3. However, if the answer is negative, ask yourself: How would I have said it in my own words?

In my experience, this exercise should help you see whether youd convey the message in a longer, more complex, and/or less precise way. You should also be able to see shortcomings in your speech (e.g. bad habits, grammatical errors) that you were not previously aware of.

S tep 3

Write down a few lines (around 150 characters) using the structure and have them corrected by a native or a proficient English speaker (e.g. a non-native English teacher).

If you dont have access to anyone who can correct your use of the structures, you can turn to online communities where people correct each other or to paid services that will correct your sentences in a matter of minutes ( on my website I link to several).