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…
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…
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…
The word “HOW” is one of the most productive words in English. It helps us create meaningful questions and sentences. The word “HOW” combines with many other words to create these questions. In this post I try to introduce the basic phrases “How much”, “How many”, “How often”, “How well”, “How long”, “How far” and…
I had been using these phrases long before I learnt that they were a grammar item. However, as I have to teach them to my students at school, I have created this short post. There is just a simple graphical presentation of the phrases and two games to practise them. To practise phrase there is…
In this post, I try to explain what countable and uncountable nouns are. When I speak with native speakers of English they often tell me that the concept of countability in English is absolutely natural. “You simply know which noun is countable and which is not.” However, this natural feeling is nearly impossible to teach….
This is quite a simple grammar point – adjectives with the endings ed or ing. The more annoying it is when students use the endings incorrectly. In this post you can find a mind map, two games and a BBC presentation on this topic. I hope it will work fine for you and that you will…
This will be quite a short post. But sometimes easy does it. So, I hope it will be the case. I would love to explain the usage and form of Used to here. To achieve this I have created the following mind map: Used to – mind map In this mind map I try to…
Many elementary students feel they cannot see the difference between these two tenses. To help them I have created a rap which explains the grammar and gives some example sentences, two mind maps explaining everything simply and several games to practise this grammar point. I hope you will find it useful. Present tenses – mind…
There are very few grammar points that I know so well as conditional sentences. Students always ask about them and they appear in tests and students. I have tried many times to explain this grammar, but I feel that I have always failed. I have created about 5 different presentations and three mind maps till…
Negative prefixes are very productive. It seems that if you learn these then you might be able to create countless English words. However, it is not enough to learn only the prefixes. As each word has its own prefix and there are just a few rules you have to learn the whole words. Knowing this,…
This material is a demonstration of the approach called CLIL. In CLIL You learn the content and thus you learn the language. However, experimenting a bit with the approach I like to do this a bit differently. First, I introduce the vocabulary through the mind map, then I present the text (this time in a…
Three days ago we were talking about presents with my students and I could hear that they were using the verbs buy,give, get etc. in a way that everyone would understand them but which was wrong. So, I created the following presentation and several exercises. What surprised me was that even after my presentation the…
In time clauses it is important to understand that you cannot use WILL after certain conjunctions, even though you are referring to the future. And that is the whole trick. If you do this (not will do this), your English will be fine. And that is what you need. Time clauses – mind map…
As there are no articles in my mother tongue, using them correctly in English is a real challenge. Like many other non-native speakers, I often leave them out or use one too many. And my students do this too. I have been thinking for years how to teach articles effectively and finally I feel that…