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…
I recently created my first app for mobile phones and it became a hit among my students. Already 85 students downloaded the game and they are working hard on learning the new vocabulary. <!– wp:more –> However, as this app was just for Czech students, I wondered whether I could offer it to people from…
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…
In this post I would like to share with you the best activities I know to teach the present simple tense. To achieve this, I will recycle some of the materials I have already and shared here. However, there are several new materials (for example the infographic) which I designed just for this post. <!–…
Elementary students are taught that there is very little difference between the words MUST and HAVE TO. Little as it may be, it exists. And in this post I would like to give you several rules which will help you decide which one is better in the given sentence. <!– wp:more –> ADVERT: [showmyads] In…
The following set of activities is for false beginners and elementary students of English. The aim of these activities is to practise the usage of the form be going to and reinforcing this form. <!– wp:more –> Make a copy of the worksheet for each student. Make an extra copy of p.1 for each student,…
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…
Easter is coming and many teachers are looking for materials connected with Easter. Here, I am offering a magazine full of materials connected with Easter for learners of English. I hope you like it. <!– wp:more –> ADVERT: [showmyadsa]
My first English language teaching activity got published in August 2008. It happened on the site http://www.teachitelt.com. The site regularly sent me the royalties and I created several more activities for them. Unfortunately, recently they sent me an email that the site is going to finish on 30th March 2016. The good thing is that…
I have always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was ten I dreamt of publishing a book. And on Saturday, thirty years later I did it. I published a book called 444 Grammar Conversations. This book is for teachers of English to have a set of questions they can use to practise a…
It is quite easy to form comparatives and superlatives in English. However, without much practice students will make a lot of mistakes. To provide enough practice for my students I have created the following exercises. There are three gap-fill exercises where students will practise the grammar in context. <!– wp:more –> ADVERT: [showmyads] In this…
Irregular verbs are probably the most important verbs in English. There are quite a lot of them and they are very common. However, for many ESL and EFL students they are very difficult to learn. <!– wp:more –> I have already prepared many activities to teach the irregular verbs to my students. There are irregular…
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…
I have spent a lot of time formulating a simple explanation how to form short answers to questions with the verb TO BE. You can find my previous attempt here. While the previous explanation did not work very well, this time, I feel that it is so simple that even the less gifted students understood…
After teaching for fifteen years, it seems that it does not matter how much and well the teacher teaches, it is the student who must learn. I have already published many methods of teaching irregular verbs. There are posts on teaching irregular verbs with a rap song, there are posts with many games and stories…
In this post, I am going to offer you materials to teach the BREAK and GIVE collocations. This post is different in one aspect, though. This time, I will give you a series of pictures which you can download and combine into your own worksheets. The advantages of this approach are obvious. You can decide…
Together with Fluency MC, we have already published several posts. You can find here four posts on irregular verbs and two posts on collocations with the verb HAVE. Fluency MC always comes with a great rap song and I create a mind map and several activities to accompany it. And this time, he came with…
When you teach the concept of countability in English, students have to learn to use the words A, SOME, THE, ANY, AN in front of the nouns correctly. To decide correctly, students have to take several mental steps.In this post I explain the mental process and I offer your students a chance to practise it…
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…