weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] Are you bored or boring? Was the last film you saw interested or interesting? There are many adjectives in English that can be used with the endings -ed and -ing, and students sometimes confuse them. If you are unsure when …
Continue reading "Grammar practice: adjectives in -ed and -ing"
In a recent grammar post I wrote about personal pronouns in English, but one thing I deliberately omitted there was the presentation of the archaic forms of the 2nd person singular. Those are thou / thee / thy and thine, which you may have come across in literary or religious texts. Let's first see what …
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] Thus sang Billie Holiday in a lovely song first recorded in 1937. Besides her, many others have made use of the three forms of the 1st person singular pronoun like that, to emphasise the intensity of their feelings: not just …
Continue reading "Me, myself and I… Personal pronouns in English"
[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 