u/ayyght

Hi everyone ☺️

I’m an English teacher in an ESL classroom and I’m currently correcting an exam. One of the exercises is about adjective vs. adverb usage, and I’d like to double-check the reasoning behind one sentence.

The sentence is:
“The teacher looked angry/angrily at the noisy students.”

Personally, I’m more on the “angrily” side, because the verb phrase “looked at” describes an action, and the adverb describes how that action is done.
So in that reading:
looked angry = describes the teacher’s emotional state
looked angrily at = describes the manner of the action

In this context, which version would you consider more natural or “correct” in standard usage? Or would you accept both in an ESL exam?

Thanks in advance for your input!