Elementary students often struggle with verbs. They know very few of them and this deficit becomes obvious at the moment they start learning the past simple tense. To help them I created the following post where I try to teach 22 frequent verbs and their past tense. <!– wp:more –> In this post, you can…
Verb master board game is intended to replace drills. The aim of this game is to help students learn to form verb tenses. While drills are boring, board games are interesting and fun. Thus, students practise the grammar forms and enjoy it. <!– wp:more –> The great advantage of the Verb master game is the…
Beginners have to memorise a lot of new words and grammar. To make the process a bit easier, I and my colleague came up with a set of simple grammar rhymes that help our learners remember the crucial verb forms. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post, I would like to share the rhymes with you. There…
The vast majority of people consider comparatives and superlatives in English easy. They usually have no problems with their formation and as there are very few exceptions, they master this grammar point pretty quickly. However, it is still a good idea to have a few interesting activities up your sleeve to teach this well. You…
Together with Fluency MC we have already published several interesting posts. In our latest post, we tried to help you teach 16 phrases with GET. And this time, there are 16 more. All the phrases come from the song by Fluency MC called GET A LIFE. And as the song contains many more phrases with…
The present perfect tense is one of the most difficult tenses for learners of English. It is not easy to form the tense correctly as you need the verb HAVE or HAS and the past participle. Moreover, the usage is very specific and many students feel that they could do with the past simple tense…
To count uncountable nouns in English students need to know the containers they are most often sold or served in. In the textbook I teach at school I need to teach six of these containers: a loaf, a tin, a packet, a glass, a cup and a bar. In this post you can find a…
A few days ago the scholars Mélodie Garnier and Norbert Schmitt published a list of most common phrasal verbs in English. Moreover, they listed the most frequent meanings of the verbs. The pedagogical impact of this discovery is really big. Finally we have the list of the phrasal verbs we should teach. You can see…
The usage of Some and Any in English is quite simple. Some is used in positive statements, requests or offers and ANY is used in questions and negative sentences. However, many textbooks confuse students by mixing this simple concept with the concept of countability. In this post I will try to keep the explanation as…
It is really important that students learn to form questions in the past simple tense. If they don’t, they won’t be able to ask about the things that happened in the past. And as most conversations deal with the things that already happened it is vital to be able to ask about the details they…
The following post on the usage of articles with proper names is not going to be 100% grammatically correct. It’s not that I’m going to insert typos here and there. What I mean is that the rules stated here are just rules of thumb and will not work all the time. I am not a…
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…
The third conditional is the most feared grammar point I know. Students of English think that it’s hard to form and understand. Therefore, when they start learning the grammar they are paralysed with fear. And as a result, they fail to learn it. Thus the third conditional keeps its reputation. ADVERT: [showmyads] But the truth…
The word LIKE is one of the most productive words in English. However, many students often confuse the meaning of the questions with LIKE and they give completely wrong answers. Especially pre-intermediate students of English find these questions really difficult. ADVERT: [showmyads] The aim of this post is to explain the meaning of different questions…
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…
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…
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 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…