weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] Correlative conjunctions are used to join words, phrases or clauses within a sentence. They always come in pairs, which is where learners sometimes make mistakes. In languages such as the South Slavic ones (which most of my students speak as …
Mark arrived on time. Or was it in time? At time??? The use of prepositions in English can be quite confusing to native speakers of other languages. Prepositional phrases can be even trickier because they seem to have a special logic of their own; one needs to learn them one at a time, understanding the …
Whenever the subject of hobbies comes up, most of my students promptly say they don’t have any. Obviously, I don't believe that for a second, but I understand why such a response: it isn’t always easy to describe one’s hobby. And if the subject comes up unexpectedly in a speaking exercise, students might not even …
Continue reading "How to talk about hobbies and free time activities"
During many years of teaching English, one thing I’ve consistently used with my students have been graded readers (you can see the ones I'm currently using in the cover photo at the top). There are different types of those - some are designed for native speaker children - but the ones I’ll be discussing here …
Continue reading "Graded readers: what are they and how to use them"
Working with students, I’ve realised many of them struggle with tasks connected with art. They are often reluctant to approach the subject because they don’t know much about the history of art, or they feel they lack relevant vocabulary. As they tell me, they wouldn’t know how to describe a painting even if they had …
grammaticus 