Sentence Structure or Sentence Patterns

My students seem still difficult to understand the verb they use in their sentences. I can recognize it from sentences they analyzed and the result of the analysis. Then I wonder, still until now, how I am able to help them understand that in English sentences in fact the patterns we have are quite similar as the ones we have in Indonesian. In Indonesian language a sentence is usually started by a subject, followed by a predicate, and so on. Well sometimes, before we have the subject, we like putting an adverb which is showing the time of the activity. Hmmm yaa adverb of time can be placed at some different positions, but the Subject, Predicate, Object, they cannot replace one another. It is not okay to put a predicate at the beginning of a sentence then followed by a subject, it’s just not the way is it is. There are rules to follow. If learners of English are good at creating a well-structured Indonesian sentence, I think it is going to be easier too for them to create sentences in English because English language has a quite similar pattern, which is Subject, Verb are used in a sentence where a subject will come first at the beginning of a sentence and it will be followed by verb and so on.

It’s just a short thought of the day that I like to share you since I am checking my students’ works and I keep finding this kind of errors in their writings.

Let’s brainstorm here 🙂
Comments are very welcome.

Cheers,