Games to help students learn English.
This post deals only with the basic usage of the modal verbs SHOULD and MUST. I have recently written a post on Modal verbs. This post was aimed at intermediate students and it demonstrated the usage and meaning of all the modal verbs in present and past tenses. You can find here a graphical presentation…
Finally, Easter is here. I have been looking for this holiday for weeks and it has arrived. I am really happy. Last year I and Lynne Blackburn devoted a lot of time to our project called ELM (English Learning Magazine.) We created a full 14 page long magazine about Easter. The magazine contains two articles…
Students usually understand the usage of the modals in present tense very quickly. However, when they start speaking about the past, they use the present tense or some non-existent forms, like “musted”. Here I’ve tried to create a simple overview of all the modal verbs and their usage in present and past tenses. I hope…
In English there are many ways to speak about future and at the same time there are many grammarians who claim that there is nothing like a future tense in English. I do not want to discuss this issue here, I would only like to present two ways of speaking about future. ADVERT: [showmyads] First…
Comparative is used when you want to compare two things. For example one person is tall and the other is short. So you will say: Person A is taller than person B. OR Person B is shorter than person A. You can see some more examples below in the picture. Superlative is used if you…
To say dates in English is quite simple. However, as there are two ways to do this, students often get confused and mix both of them together. I hope that this post will help them clarify this extremely important area. To be able to say dates in English correctly, it is necessary to know the…
Here we go at last! This is the last chapter of the story Two Dates. Are you curious what will happen to Alan, Martha and Bruce. I hope that the ending of the story will surprise you at least a bit and that you will like it. So, what are you waiting for? Start with…
Last week I was teaching past perfect in one of my classes and suddenly one of the students exclaimed: “Finally we are learning something new.” And by new she meant useful as well. I am not sure how useful this tense might be for people who want to speak English but it is certainly very…
Have you been wondering what the big shock for Alan was? The story continues here. Once again you can learn 16 new words and practise them in a game. Then you can check your comprehension with a mind map which once again serves as a worksheet too. The next chapter of the story Two Dates…
The first chapter of the story Two Dates proved to be quite popular. The story will have 4 chapters in all. Here is the second one. Here is a mind map for the second chapter of the story Two Dates. In my opinion the ideal way to proceed with this post is to learn the…
This morning I was preparing a presentation for one of my classes on separable and not separable phrasal verbs and suddenly an interesting pattern appeared. It seems that the fact that the particle is separable can be guessed according to the particle that is used. I am not sure whether it works all the time,…
I don’t know whether anyone will be interested in this mini series called Two Dates. However, as all the research shows that extensive reading helps students improve their English I put it here. There is a short story cut into four parts and a mind map which can serve as a comprehension worksheet. Moreover, you…
To learn Passive voice it is necessary to know the past participles. If you do not know the past participles go to our post on Past participle and learn the irregular verbs first. Once you do not have any problems with past participles, it is time to learn the Passive voice in English. Passive voice…
In this post you should learn to read and write numbers in English. To help you with this I have created a simple graphical presentation and three games. I hope you will find them useful and that it will help you learn English better. Have a look at the graphic and read the instructions how…
Some time ago I presented here an infographics on present perfect tense. This infographic contains a lot of interesting information but when I tried to teach the present perfect tense using it, I found out that I failed. That is why I have prepared this new one where I try to introduce the form and…
Several weeks ago I published a post on Conditionals. In the post, I tried to cover all the conditionals in one mind map and I think that I succeeded.However, the post was unnecessarily complicated for lower level students. Therefore I created a simpler one for lower intermediate students who need to know only the second…
Last week I taught passive and present perfect tense. I thought that I was well prepared but in both cases we encountered one big problem. The students could not form the past participles correctly. So they fought with the past participles and completely ignored the grammar taught. ADVERTISEMENT: [showmyads] So now I know that we…
The word “HOW” is one of the most productive words in English. It helps us create meaningful questions and sentences. The word “HOW” combines with many other words to create these questions. In this post I try to introduce the basic phrases “How much”, “How many”, “How often”, “How well”, “How long”, “How far” and…
I had been using these phrases long before I learnt that they were a grammar item. However, as I have to teach them to my students at school, I have created this short post. There is just a simple graphical presentation of the phrases and two games to practise them. To practise phrase there is…
Two days ago we encountered a simple exercise in our textbook. Students’ task was to fill in the missing prepositions. Even though my students are strong lower intermediate students who can understand a lot of English and speak quite fluently, they were not able to use the correct prepositions. Although the students met the adjectives…