I have already published several posts on irregular verbs: Past participles – divided according to the pronunciation and Present perfect tense. However, a week ago a student of mine contacted me and asked me if I could create a way for him to learn the irregular verbs. He spends a lot of time driving so…
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…
Have you tried our vocabulary placement test for elementary students, and it was too easy for you? Have you scored close to 2000? Then this is the vocabulary test you should take. Here we test the words which belong between 2,000 and 5,000 most frequent words in English. ADVERT: [showmyads] There are 60 questions and…
Students like reading comics. Comics are often the only thing students read. When I started an extensive reading project last year, students did not mind reading comics, however when we moved to short stories, more than half of them stopped reading and started to hate the programme. On the basis of this experience I have…
I have already dealt with the usage of prepositions in the posts Prepositions AT, IN and ON for time and Adjectives with prepositions. However, this post is different because it concentrates only on the phrases IN THE END, AT THE END, IN TIME and ON TIME which are frequently used incorrectly by students of English….
For many learners of English the slight differences between the words BIG vs. LARGE and HIGH vs. TALL are very difficult to understand. In this post I will try to make the differences clearer and easy to remember. To achieve this, I have come up with two videos, two quizzes and two mind maps. I…
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…
If you do not know a sound, your brain filters it out when you hear someone using it. That is why it is crucial to teach sounds that do not exist in students’ mother tongue. Moreover, Adrian Tennant at www.onestopenglish.com claims that you should learn to hear and say the new sounds at the same…
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…
When I started this website I dreamt of a site full of games that would be so interesting that students would want to play them and to play them they would have to learn English. However, for nearly a year it was just a dream. I did not know how to create a game like…
This post is about common mistakes in English. There are two pieces of interesting research into learning and teaching English. One of them says that students learn more if someone else is corrected by the teacher than if they are corrected. The other found out that students learn and remember more vocabulary if the words…
Many verbs in English are often followed by the same preposition. Therefore it is best to learn them togehter from the beginning. However, even if you do this it is neccessary to sum it up from time to time. ADVERT [showmyads] The following summary was created for my elementary students of English and it contains…
The environment is one of the most frequently discussed topics in the world. However, to be able to speak about this topic you need some basic vocabulary. In this post I try to introduce some words related to the topic of Environment. Later you can practise the new words in games. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this…
Comparative is used when you want to compare two things. For example one person is tall and the other is short. So you will say: Person A is taller than person B. OR Person B is shorter than person A. You can see some more examples below in the picture. Superlative is used if you…
Have you been wondering what the big shock for Alan was? The story continues here. Once again you can learn 16 new words and practise them in a game. Then you can check your comprehension with a mind map which once again serves as a worksheet too. The next chapter of the story Two Dates…
In this post you should learn to read and write numbers in English. To help you with this I have created a simple graphical presentation and three games. I hope you will find them useful and that it will help you learn English better. Have a look at the graphic and read the instructions how…
Phrasal verbs are always difficult to learn. Even though they consist of two or three tiny words, which are easy to remember themselves, they can create so many different combinations that students quickly become totally confused. Moreover, the meaning of the phrasal verb cannot be deduced from its parts. Therefore the students do not know…