This post is part of a series relating to the Minimum Standards for Grammar and Punctuation in the NAPLAN tests. For the first post in this series, click here.

At Year 7 level, the students are expected to be able to:

• identify the correct personal pronoun required to complete a sentence

It came as some surprise to me when I learned (while at uni) that the use of ‘a’ instead of ‘an’ was governed by a fairly obvious and neat little rule.

So I offer no judgement if you are realising for the first time that personal pronouns are dictated by: number, person, gender and case. At this level, it seems that NAPLAN are only interested in personal pronouns, not possessive pronouns – or any of the millions of other types of pronouns – so don’t worry about ‘our’, ‘his’, ‘her’ or ‘their’.

Personal pronouns are expressed in a neat little table that looks like the one below (from this website).

This site also has example sentences that are not of the quality of, ‘The cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most’ but do illustrate the different applications of the pronouns nonetheless.

If you come across a student who is struggling with this, you can send them to this astonishingly boring ‘game’ here. If you find a better game, let me know.

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