Vocabulary is much more important than grammar. If you know the meaning of the words you can understand a text even without knowing the grammar. If you listen to a recording and you know the vocabulary, you will understand the meaning of the message. <!– wp:more –> If you watch a video and understand the…
Paul Nation in his book What Should Every EFL Teacher Know suggests that every language course should consist of four strands: Vocabulary development, Extensive input and output, grammar explanation and fluency development. By giving these four strands equal amount of time in EFL lessons, students will learn the foreign language. <!– wp:more –> In this…
I have just published a new book. It is called Grammar Up. Grammar Up is a new, holistic approach to teaching and learning English grammar. <!– wp:more –> 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…
We live and teach in the communicative era. However, the textbooks offer very few speaking activities where students could practise the language they have learnt. That is why I decided to share several speaking activities with you. <!– wp:more –> In this post there are two speaking activities to practise describing a house using the…
Mobile phones are bad! Students spend hours on mobile apps and they do not learn! What can we do about it? I tried to do something about it. I prepared a responsive website for my students to learn on their mobiles and … they didn´t come. <!– wp:more –> But then I created my first…
Speaking activities are essential in a communicative approach. Most people agree that students should communicate ever since they start learning English. However, it is really difficult to design genuine communicative tasks for low-level students of English. In this post, I would like to share two communicative tasks for beginners. In the first one, students practise…
For ESL students and pupils in Great Britain, India, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries, it is crucial to learn the parts of speech in English. In fact, this knowledge is very useful for EFL learners too, as it helps them get more information from dictionaries and grammar books. And as this topic is…
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…