What are stacked adjectives?
Nothing made me feel more inculcated into my own language than the idea of stacked adjectives. As native English speakers, it’s not something we often consciously think about. Nonetheless, I’ve learned that teaching my youngest ESL students adjectival order is not only beneficial to their long-term studies, I’ve discovered a pleasurable approach that insures the lessons stick in their memory. Unlike native speakers, it has to be taught intentionally.
In an English speaker’s subconscious mind, multiple adjectives have a specific order. When they fall out of that learned order, the brain glitches and the meaning can be lost, confused, or even misconstrued.
Let me quote from Katy Waldman’s The Secret Rules of Adjective Order:
Though red big barns and big red barns are semantically identical, the second kind pleases our ears more. These tricky situations – neither pure correlation nor accumulation – generally occur when you cross the border between adjectival regions, such as size and color. When that happens, an invisible code snaps into place, and the eight categories shimmy into one magistral conga line: general opinion, then specific opinion then size then shape then age then color then provenance then material.
Thank you Katy! Think about the following sentences:
A black cat.
A big black cat.
A big black plastic cat.
A beautiful big black plastic cat.
A beautiful big old black plastic cat.
A beautiful big old black French plastic cat.
Even the simple sentence, “A black big cat” is a language pothole, difficult for an English speaker to mentally ignore, let alone read when the adjectives are out of their stacked order (did you miss it or did your brain reorder the sentence?) Figure this one out:
A yellow cotton handsome Indian new jacket.
It’s difficult to even say, much less discern what the sentence is trying to convey, coming off more like a word salad to an English speaker’s way of ordering meaning. In their proper sequence, the adjectives should be aligned thusly:
A handsome new yellow Indian cotton jacket.
How did it happen that, without any memory of having learned this, I expect my adjectives to be in a choreographed line dance with each other? It begins when we’re very young and is reinforced in numerous story and picture books, like Lillie’s Purple Plastic Purse, or The Giant Jam Sandwich.
So, don’t be afraid to start exposing your ESL students to adjectival order. In fact, I recommend that you start off very young – even before they learn how to read. With a bit of forward-thinking, it will make their elementary and junior high school English classes a little easier. If you’ve been doing chants such as, “Five Little Monkeys” or “Five Little Ducks,” you’re not only priming your kids to hear the sounds associated with numbers and plurals, but stacked adjectives as well!
Making Sentences Without Words
Start with simple nouns that begin with a consonant, like ‘cat.’ Pull out an ‘A’ card from your ABC deck. Then grab a few of your number, color, size, and emotions cards as well. (Download color and number flashcards from my online store for free!)
Start with a simple minor sentence. Then add a color adjective. Once kids understand this easy pattern, mix the cards up, and have students reorder or make new sentences themselves. It may be helpful to teach your kids that ‘A’ means ‘1’ in this context.* Don’t forget to make a small ‘period’ or ‘full stop’ card as well. And there’s no need to be all academic when explaining it! There will be plenty of time for that in their little futures. Teach a ‘period’ as a ‘bliiiing!’ or ‘ker-dunk’ or a Khoisan click of your tongue and I promise your kids will never forget to include it – to the point of annoyance.
Now, let’s add some more adjectives.
With emotions, colors, size, and an ‘A’ card, your kids have learned to make their first stacks of adjectives – and they can’t even read yet! You’re also teaching them to recognize ‘A’ as their first sight word. Like many teachers, you’ve probably been drilling a lot of vocabulary in separate flashcard sets