Recently I have published a post on giving advice. And our post on modal verbs won the British Council blog award. This post will deal with three ways to express the modal verb SHOULD. The different means are HAD BETTER and OUGHT TO. Both of these have the same meaning as SHOULD. This grammar point…
First conditional is very similar to time clauses. However, I would say that first conditional is easier than time clauses. First conditional is used if we speak about two possibilities in the future. After the conjunction IF we use present simple tense and in the other clause we use WILL. You can see the explanation…
Have you ever tried to memorise the following list of verbs to know when you should use TO and when the ending ING? ADVERT: [showmyads] Honestly, I have never been able to commit the list to memory. And even when I thought that I know the verbs I was not really sure which form follows…
Phrasal verbs make many students feel hopeless. Even advanced students struggle with them and to be honest, I am not very comfortable with them either. Moreover, they seem very hard to memorise. That is why I have prepared the following post. There is a story where all the verbs are used. Thus you can see…
For and since are often given as the key words which signal that present perfect tense should be used. It is not 100% true but it makes life easier for elementary and lower intermediate students. However, sometimes it is difficult for learners to know which word they should use. The rule is simple. FOR is…
There are many ways to speak about future in English. We have already dealt with two ways here. In the first blog we tried to distinguish between Will and MAY and Might on the basis of certainty that an event will happen. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post I would like to demonstrate the difference between…
I remember struggling with this grammar when I was at secondary school. As it is possible to translate the words IF and WITH with the same word in my mother tongue I couldn’t see the difference in English. ADVERT: [showmyads] To help my students avoid this problem I have created the following mind map and…
Recently I have been dealing with the modal verbs. First I created a mind map depicting all the modals in present and past tenses. That post was suitable for intemediate students. Then I wrote a post about the modal verbs Must and Should which was for elementary students. In this post I would like to…
There have been many different attempts to explain the difference between the past simple and present perfect tenses to learners of English. I have tried to do this for example in my posts on present perfect basics, Present perfect tense vs Past simple or present perfect infographics. In the textbook New Inside Out pre-intermediate they…
This is one of the easiest grammar points for the Czech students because in their mother tongue there exists a structure which is similar to infinitive of purpose. Because of this, I am not going to spend too much time and energy on this grammar point. Advert: [showmyads] There is just a mind map explaining…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…