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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Today I experienced the great teaching moment when one of my not so proficient students said that she can understand the grammar perfectly and that it is really easy. I was exalted. I was teaching present continuous tense and the students really liked it and at the end of the lesson they were able to…
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…
There are many different ways to speak about the future in English. You can find all of them in the previous posts on future tenses at Will or be going to or at Be going to post. In this post I would like to explain and teach the usage of WILL for speaking about the…
The basic explanation of the usage of the phrase THERE IS / THERE ARE is easy to understand and practice. My students caught on very quickly and then used the phrase without any mistakes. However, you might need to teach the plural first to allow the students use these without any mistakes. In this post…
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 published several posts on past simple tense. There are several posts on irregular verbs, a post on regular verbs in past tense and now I would like to explain how to make negative sentences in past simple. It is quite simple – you just add DIDN´T and the infinitive. To help you…
SVOMPT rule is one of the most important rules in English. If students learn to follow this rule, their English will improve dramatically, and they will be understood. Once a student knows some words and follows the SVOMPT rule, we can say that he/she can speak English. ADVERT: [showmyads] I love Darren Crown’s explanation of…
Our most popular post is about questions with HOW. There is another post on all the WH question words. In this post I would like to deal with the questions starting with the word WHAT. To help you with this grammar there is a mind map and two games. ADVERT: [showmyads] The mind map shows…
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…
This is another post in my series of simple grammar explanations for elementary and beginner learners of English. In this post I try to explain the usage of the possessive ‘s and ‘. There is a mind map and several exercises to check the students’ understanding of the grammar. ADVERT: [showmyads] If you think you…
Next school year I am going to teach low level students, so I started to prepare materials for them. The first one deals with the verb to be in affirmative and negative sentences. The verb to be is the most important verb in English. You need it all the time. That is why solid knowledge…