Inflectional suffixes: verbs
7 RepliesEight inflectional suffixes are part of the grammar of English, so you can’t write many sentences without them. Four attach to verbs, but they aren’t just letters or letter strings. They carry meaning, and their pronunciation and spelling often depends on what our mouths are saying before them, at the end of the base word.
Teachers often aren’t taught much about these suffixes, which are more flexible than they look e.g. some can be used to create nouns and adjectives. Most parents are even more poorly equipped to explain how they work.
Here’s an eight minute video about the use, pronunciation and spelling of the four English inflectional verb suffixes. I hope it helps you explain them to kids. Sorry if an ad appears because the video is on YouTube, I am trying to work out how to turn them off.
To see the first video in this series, about inflectional noun suffixes, click here.
To get the letter/spelling/suffix tiles used in this video, go to www.spelfabet.com.au/materials/moveable-alphabet-affixes-mnemonics. For 20% off anything in the Spelfabet shop until June 30 2026, use the code “EOFY 2026” at the checkout.
Alison Clarke
Speech Pathologist
7 responses to “Inflectional suffixes: verbs”
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The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
Gold!!! Alison, as a tertiary student which course should teach me this kind of information: speech pathology, education, English??? Alternatively, can you recommend a textbook???
Hi Jemima, the most useful course I ever did to help me understand English grammar was the Cambridge RSA CTEFLA course, now called CELTA, see https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/teaching-english/teaching-qualifications/celta. I did it at RMIT in the 1990s, I’m not sure who is offering it now. It’s intense and expensive but I found it a whole lot more useful for teaching English than my Speech Pathology or Applied Linguistics degrees. Also, one of the best bits of advice I got when I went off overseas to teach English was to get Michael Swan’s textbook called Practical English Usage, which tells you about the ACTUAL ways people use English, as distinct from the oversimplified, rulesy nonsense in many grammar text books. Definitely worth getting if you are interested in understanding English usage. It even has a section on swear and taboo words which I used to give out to my advanced students in Mexico, because translations from English movies were very misleading (e.g. “you %$Z#@&* !@#$%^&” captioned to mean “You are a very bad man”) and they desperately needed a concise and accurate explanation of exactly what each word means and when it is OK/very not OK to use it.
great explanation Alison, love the use of the visual props and letter tiles.
Thankyou! Toys always make things more fun, and I have plenty of them.
This is absolutely GOLD! Thank you.
Thanks for the lovely feedback!
These videos are wonderful Alison and I didn’t get any ads watching today!
The visual and concrete examples really help.