The post on countability has been the seventh most viewed post at our site. More nearly 95,000 people have seen it and hopefully used it. While the post is great for intermediate students of English, it is very theoretical. This post aims to be more practical and for a bit lower level of students. Here…
Teaching adverbs of frequency has to consist of several steps. First, the students have to learn the words. If they do not know the words it is useless to teach them the grammar. Once you are sure that the students know the adverbs you have to teach them where they should place them in a…
This has been the third post on irregular verbs. There are 24 more irregular verbs presented in two videos. Then you can practise each group of verbs on a worksheet or in interactive games and quizzes. When I counted I found out that each verb is practised at least 7 times. I have tried the…
Asking questions is one of the most important functions of a language. Making questions in English is quite easy, but students still need to understand the basics. I have tried to put all the basic rules into a mind map. Then I have come up with a story about question formation and several games to…
As students reacted very positively to the first post on irregular verbs I am going to continue with teaching the irregular verbs in this way. Once again I am going to teach 24 irregular verbs with their past tense and past participle. The verbs are divided into two groups of 12 and there are separate…
I have already tried teaching irregular verbs in many ways. I have tried irregular verbs associative method, irregular verbs listening drill, irregular verbs in context and many others. However, the results were not very good. Only about half of the students know the verbs. ADVERT:[showmyads] That is why in my next four posts I would…
The basic explanation of the usage of the phrase THERE IS / THERE ARE is easy to understand and practice. My students caught on very quickly and then used the phrase without any mistakes. However, you might need to teach the plural first to allow the students use these without any mistakes. In this post…
Teaching irregular verbs is really difficult. I have tried many different methods and I still feel that I have not succeeded. You can see several of my previous attempts at this site. For example there is a post on irregular verbs using associative method or a post with a rap with irregular verbs or a…
Plurals are quite easy to understand. In English 1 is a singular and more than 1 is plural. To put it easy you add -s to the end of a singular form to create the plural. However, it is not always that easy, as there are several exceptions. In this post I would like to…
Question formation in general causes problems. Students get easily confused and they feel that they are not able to form the questions. But in fact, it is very simple. If you follow the steps below you can teach the questions in the past tense in no time. The lesson is based on the principles of…
We usually present just one tense to students. However, ever since I was a student I have always wanted to see a more complex picture and get more tenses at the same time. And as we have just finished the whole textbook with one of my elementary students an opportunity presented itself to sum up…
I have already published several posts on past simple tense. There are several posts on irregular verbs, a post on regular verbs in past tense and now I would like to explain how to make negative sentences in past simple. It is quite simple – you just add DIDN´T and the infinitive. To help you…
This has been my third post on irregular verbs in a short time. In the first two posts I have tried the associative method, and MP3 drills. While the associative method was not that successful the MP3 drills certainly work. However, they presuppose that the students will learn at home and will play the recording…
Teaching of past tense always starts with the verbs was and were, and then the regular verbs are introduced. And in the end, the students learn that there are over 200 irregular verbs which they have to learn. I have posted several articles on irregular verbs and on past tense in general. However, this is…
I have already published a post on Present simple and continuous tense here. However, as my teaching situation changed I realize that I need a slightly different type of materials and a bit more of them. So in this post I add the following materials: a Song, Speaking exercise, graphical explanation of the usage of…
I have changed jobs and now I teach at elementary school. And even though I think that I am an experienced teacher I have never taught students with actual learning problems. Now I do, and I face real challenges. For example, this week I taught the verb HAVE GOT from the Project 1 textbook, and…
As the word WAS is the ninth and WERE the 34th most frequent word in English it is crucial to use them correctly. You simply cannot avoid using these words, and if you make mistakes in these two words, people will think that you cannot speak English. For teachers it is important to teach this…
In my latest post on irregular verbs I tried to teach 33 irregular verbs. In this post, I would like to add other 30 verbs which I hope you will learn through either the associative method or by using the spaced mp3 recording. ADVERT: [showmyads] You can learn the irregular verbs by using the so…
I have already published several posts on irregular verbs: Past participles – divided according to the pronunciation and Present perfect tense. However, a week ago a student of mine contacted me and asked me if I could create a way for him to learn the irregular verbs. He spends a lot of time driving so…
SVOMPT rule is one of the most important rules in English. If students learn to follow this rule, their English will improve dramatically, and they will be understood. Once a student knows some words and follows the SVOMPT rule, we can say that he/she can speak English. ADVERT: [showmyads] I love Darren Crown’s explanation of…