Learning the -s ending for third-person singular verbs can be tricky. Here are three engaging activities that use Van Patten’s input processing method to help students grasp this important rule. 1. Video Activity: Guess the First Word This activity is designed to focus students on verb forms to determine subject pronouns. How it Works:In a…
Speaking activities are the best thing in teaching and learning a foreign language. However, students sometimes run out of ideas about what they should say or the language they use is far from the one we try to teach them. To solve the problem, I designed the CARD SPEAKING activity.
Play with your students this board game to practise the verb CAN. Students play the game and practice the grammar.
In this post, I would like to share the materials I have created recently to teach the verb HAVE GOT.
The aim of this post is to give you a set of materials to help you teach the difference between the present simple and continuous tenses. You can find several other resources on this topic here and here. Moreover, there is a great video by BBC called Grammar Gameshow.
It has been known that people remember grammar rules best if they come up with their own explanation. Therefore, the teachers should try to design their teaching activities in such a way that they will help students create their own rules.
Recently my colleague noticed that our textbook contains too few exercises to practise the verb HAVE GOT. To bridge this gap I decided to create a board game. A board game will allow my students practise the grammar in a fun way and this activity can be used repeatedly.
Grammar Up is a new, holistic approach to teaching and learning English grammar. When you take English in school, you learn one piece of grammar at a time. After a while, you become confused by all the rules, and you forget most of them. Native speakers don’t know the rules for the grammar. They use…
Engames and Fluency MC have joined forces again to bring you a post that will help you decide whether you should use a gerund or an infinitive after a verb. This post is not going to provide a comprehensive overview of the grammar. Our aim is to give your students a simple guide to help…
Yesterday a friend sent me a song he’d written that uses only the past simple and past continuous tenses. He asked me how I liked it, and I had to admit it was great. A few hours later I encountered a short explanation of the same grammar by Australiaplus.com, and I realised that I wanted…
The past tenses of the modal verbs MUST, CAN and CAN’T often cause problems, even for advanced students of English. I have heard some of my best students, who had already passed the CAE exam, use words like MUSTED, and I was not happy about it. That is why I try to teach this grammar…
Recently I have published 4 posts on teaching irregular verbs. The posts were based on a rap song by Fluency MC. This post is different. This time I am introducing a new method of teaching the past tense of irregular verbs. The method is called the Visual-Audio Method, and I think it is completely new….
This is the last post in which we try to teach the irregular verbs mentioned in the rap song by Fluency MC. This time there are 15 irregular verbs and to help you teach or learn them there is an infographic, a quiz and a game. First, listen to the following song and complete the…
Students often learn just one piece of grammar in a lesson. Most of them master that day’s subject and move on to the next. But, when the time for revision comes, they often don’t remember what they’ve learnt. For example, two weeks ago my class encountered an exercise in which several tenses were revised. First,…
As I wrote before, irregular verbs are the most important thing for all students of English to learn. However, it is not easy to master them. That is why Fluency and I started to collaborate on a series of posts that deal with teaching just the irregular verbs.ADVERT:[showmyads]In this post we are going to introduce…
In my opinion, irregular verbs are the most important thing one has to learn in English. Therefore, it is absolutely essential that students know them. However, teaching them is not easy. There are no rules, and the number of new words that students manage to commit to memory is quite low. Thus the teaching materials…
I have already published 10 posts on teaching irregular verbs. You can see the list of the posts down here: Irregular verbs again Irregular verbs again 2 Irregular verbs – third time lucky? Irregular verbs in context 1 Irregular verbs straightforward ADVERT:[showmyads] Irregular verbs straightforward #2 Irregular verbs straightforward #3 Teach 9 irregular verbs in…
Students often hesitate over whether they should use an adverb or an adjective in a sentence. And to be honest, I did not make it much easier for them with my explanations. So I decided to buckle down to work and create a simple system which will work for my students. Here is the final…
Most placement tests are for adults. There are few placement tests for young students. Thus, when a teacher tries to test his or her students’ proficiency in English using a standard placement test, the students quickly become discouraged because they don’t understand anything. Then the final results tell you nothing about the students´ knowledge. This…
Questions with the verbs WAS and WERE are among the most common in English. Therefore it is vital for students to learn these questions well. They have to be able to form them, understand them and answer them. To help you teach these types of questions, I have included the following activities in this post:…