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:…
I like teaching prepositions of place. I can use the Cuisenaire rods, and my students can be creative in many ways and use English a lot. Here I would like to share the activities I use to teach prepositions of place. In this post you can find the following activities: a mind map, an infographic,…
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…
For an unknown reason many elementary textbooks teach HAVE GOT at the very beginning. Students find it difficult and they get confused. Moreover, they get even more fed up when they learn that the Americans do not use this form. But I have to teach the grammar, so there is no use crying over spilt…
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…
Recently I have felt that my lessons are not language rich. And that is something no EFL teacher is happy about. For example, I have been teaching questions to my fourth graders. We learnt all the vocabulary and grammar, but when I asked my students the questions, they were not able to answer. They did…
Vocabulary is the most important part of language. Without grammar you can communicate with difficulty, but without vocabulary you cannot say anything. In this post, I would like to teach nearly 30 vocabulary items for different town facilities. I have included an infographic, an online quiz and a worksheet with several vocabulary activities. There is…
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…
Placement tests are extremely important if you do not know your students well and you need to know what to teach them. Further, these tests can be used to measure whether your students made any progress during a certain period of time. Placement tests are often professionally produced and sold for a lot of money….
Present simple and present continuous are easy tenses to learn in English. However, as simple as they are, there are still many students who make mistakes in these English tenses. For this post I have collected the most common mistakes my students make. I believe it is much better to learn from the mistakes others…
When students start to learn English as a second language, there is a set of basic questions in English they need to master. All language courses start with these questions, but many people struggle to learn them. It is necessary to learn these by heart. However, you also need to be able to vary them…
Teaching irregular verbs in context is not only useful, but rewarding too. A short story attracts the attention of students and can be used in many communicative activities. Unfortunately, there are not many short stories which can be easily used for teaching the past tense. Advert: [showmyads] Luckily, my friend Lynne Blackburn sent me a…
Weather is one of the most common conversational topics in Britain. Therefore, if you know the basic vocabulary, you can talk to 60 million people. With 60 million conversation opportunities, it is well worth the little effort you need to put in.To make it as enjoyable as possible, there are several activities to help you…
I have already created two posts on the difference between the present simple and continuous tenses. There are Present simple or present continuous tense – improved and Present simple and continuous tenses posts. Both of them are good but as I have come up with a new idea, I want to share it with you…
This is the third post which contains ten new words for intermediate students. The words are among the 4,000 most frequent words in English. This selection of words is based on Paul Nation’s list of words. If you have missed the first post on vocabulary, you can find it here. The second post Learn 10…
Present simple is one of the most important tenses in English. It is quite easy to teach and learn but it must be done properly. In this post I am going to teach some vocabulary first and then teach the forms using the verbs. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post you can find a worksheet, a…
Teaching irregular verbs can be fun. The verbs are easy to use to tell stories and stories are interesting for everyone. In the following post I am going to tell a story and you can learn the past tense of ten irregular verbs there. ADVERT: [showmyads] To achieve this there are a video, a worksheet,…
Most of the people who learn English spend their life in an office. Therefore it is neccessary for them to learn the names of the equipment there. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post I introduce 25 office vocabulary items in an infographic and a video. You can then practise all the words in interactive quizzes (over…
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…