Games to help students learn English.
The phrase USED TO is one of the highly productive chunks in English. I have already published a post on Used to but I have created several new activities since, and I would like to share those with you. So, in this post you will find several USED TO grammar activities which will help you…
Do your students struggle with the words somebody, anybody, something, anything, everything, everybody, nothing and nobody? Do they get these basic words wrong nearly every time? If your answer is yes, then this post is just for you. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post I would like to share with you several tools to help your…
A few days ago the scholars Mélodie Garnier and Norbert Schmitt published a list of most common phrasal verbs in English. Moreover, they listed the most frequent meanings of the verbs. The pedagogical impact of this discovery is really big. Finally we have the list of the phrasal verbs we should teach. You can see…
The usage of Some and Any in English is quite simple. Some is used in positive statements, requests or offers and ANY is used in questions and negative sentences. However, many textbooks confuse students by mixing this simple concept with the concept of countability. In this post I will try to keep the explanation as…
All the pedagogy books tell you that pictures are much more memorable than words. There is even this saying “A picture is worth thousand words”. So why don’t we use this fact and use pictures for teaching for example irregular verbs? Unfortunately, things are not that easy. In fact, the research shows that it is…
Once elementary students master forming questions in the present simple tense, their communicative ability grows by hundreds of percent. Students then can ask nearly about anything, and all of a sudden they can communicate meaningfully. However, for many teachers the questions are a nightmare because only a few students do really learn to form the…
Halloween is coming, and it would be nice if we had a set of fresh activities for this occasion. Children remember everything, and it is pretty embarrassing when you recycle something and the children shout out- “I know this!!! We’ve already done it.” Or, “My sister told me that you did this last year with…
Mistakes that students make should serve as an opportunity to learn. But more often than not students just look at or listen to your correction and pass the opportunity. And that is a pity. As I do not want my students to miss this precious opportunity any more I have come up with a lesson…
I have already published several speaking activities. There is Summer Holiday Speaking activity or School Subjects Speaking Activity. However, this post is different as the speaking activity here is a sample FCE exam speaking test. The FCE speaking exam consists of four parts. In this post you can find an example of each part and…
Youtube is one of the most popular websites on the internet. 4 billion videos are watched every day there. Therefore we should not ignore it and try to use it to teach English. In this post I take one of the Youtube videos and I build the whole lesson around it. It is the video…
There are some grammar points which I have been struggling with for years. Not that I would not understand them or use them incorrectly, but I always fail when I try to pass my knowledge to my students. And the usage of present continuous for future arrangements was one of the grammar points that I…
Irregular verbs are an evergreen in TEFL. There are a lot of them and students have to memorise them. There seems to be no way around it. However, I still try to come up with something that will make this hard work easier for my students. And this time I try to teach 31 irregular…
In my opinion the modal verb CAN is one of the easiest grammar points in English to teach. That is why I have not produced a post on this topic yet. However, this is going to change, as I am in need of one and I am going to share it here with you. In…
Sometimes easy does it. Two days ago I was assigned to teach a short dialogue to a group of students with learning disabilities and problems. I created a set of three activities and I did not held any high expectations. However, it turned out that the students liked the activities and many of them actually…
I have always believed that questions are one of the most important things in a language. That is why I devote quite a lot of my teaching time to teaching questions. I have already written several posts on teaching questions: Forming questions in Past tense Questions with like ADVERT: [showmyads] Questions with WAS and WERE…
Giving directions in English is one of the most useful functions there is. Everyone understands that this is the function they are likely to use on the street, literally, and therefore the motivation is usually quite easy. To be able to give directions you need to learn a set of phrases which you later combine…
It is really important that students learn to form questions in the past simple tense. If they don’t, they won’t be able to ask about the things that happened in the past. And as most conversations deal with the things that already happened it is vital to be able to ask about the details they…
The following post on the usage of articles with proper names is not going to be 100% grammatically correct. It’s not that I’m going to insert typos here and there. What I mean is that the rules stated here are just rules of thumb and will not work all the time. I am not a…
Recently Fluency MC and I worked on a post about body parts. In the post we presented about thirty parts of the body. We used a wonderful rap song by Jason Levine, an infographic and a quiz to teach these words. Then Jules from English Through Music Madrid contacted me and informed me that he…
I was looking for some short and useful activities which I could use in class. For a long time I could not find any interesting, yet extremely short texts which I could use if I had between five and ten minutes to spare. And then I encountered Pope Francis’ tweets and I tried to convert…