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…
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…
I always loved the word formation part of the FCE test. This was the part of the test where I always scored really high. However, some of my students don’t. So I sat down and tried to find out why I have been so successful in this part of the test. And the result? I…
Conditionals scare students to death. They seem complicated and difficult to understand. But as I explain, they only seem to be like this. In fact, they are quite simple and easy to comprehend. In this post, I will try to keep things as simple as possible. I will deal only with one type of conditional…
The past continuous tense is one of the most graphical tenses in English. By “graphical” I mean that it is easy to demonstrate the difference between the past simple and past continuous tense in a video or in a short dramatic sketch. Unfortunately, I could not find a video demonstrating the difference betweent the two…
In the following post intermediate students of English can learn to form wish clauses starting with I WISH or IF ONLY. In my opinion wish clauses are quite easy to master. However, if you feel it differently, there are several helpful features to change your mind. There are several interactive quizzes, an explanatory video and…
The difference between LITTLE and FEW, especially when you add A LITTLE and A FEW, causes a lot of problems event to students whose English is really good. In this post I try to teach the difference in a graphical way. Having studied the infographic, you should try the interactive quiz and check whether you…
About half a year ago I published a post where I tried to explain the usage of 5 different tenses. About 71,000 people have viewed this post but several complained that there was not enough practice. That is why I have decided to reintroduce this topic and add three more quizzes to practise the five…
Students make a lot of mistakes in present perfect tense. I have tried to collect the most typical ones and I have put them into a mind map and tried to explain the rules there. Moreover, I have added two games to give the students a chance to practice the grammar one more time. To…
Prepositions are one of the favourite test items. They appear at tests like FCE or CAE and if you know them then you can get a lot of points. Moreover, if you use the prepositions correctly, people find it easier to understand you. The aim of this post is to teach several high-frequency phrases starting…
I have already dealt with the usage of prepositions in the posts Prepositions AT, IN and ON for time and Adjectives with prepositions. However, this post is different because it concentrates only on the phrases IN THE END, AT THE END, IN TIME and ON TIME which are frequently used incorrectly by students of English….
In this post I would like to teach you how to use the words DESPITE, IN SPITE OF, ALTHOUGH, EVEN THOUGH, BECAUSE OF and BECAUSE correctly. I will explain the meaning of the words and the grammar. To help you with this there are two games, a mind map, a video explanation and a graphical…
When students hear the phrase indirect questions, they get scared. But actually this is one of the easiest grammar points in English. The only thing you have to watch out for is that if a sentence starts with a certain phrase (Do you know or Could you tell me etc.) you have to use the…
A few days ago I wrote a post where I dealt with the mistakes my students made during their final exams. There were six common mistakes which I felt needed explanation and correction. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post I will deal with six more common mistakes that my students make. Some of them are really…