“Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: Could have, would have, and should have.” (Louis E. Boone)
I hope no one minds that I have made a gentle alteration to the above quotation: It orinally read, ‘Could have, might have, and should […]
Entries Tagged as 'Auxiliaries'
Shoulda coulda woulda quotations
October 7th, 2008 · 1 Comment
Tags: Auxiliaries · Conditionals · Could have, should have, would have · Grammar · Learner-friendly corpora · Lesson plans · Translation · Using quotations sites
Could’ve, should’ve, would’ve (a lesson plan)
July 9th, 2008 · 7 Comments
could’ve-should’ve-would’ve.pdf
Here is the slideshow that I have referred to in the current issue of English Teaching Professional. It consists of 12 book cover images taken from Amazon.co.uk, each of which contains one of the following notoriously problematic structures:
Could + have + past participle
Should + have + past participle
Would + have + past participle
Ideas for […]
Tags: Auxiliaries · Conditionals · Could have, should have, would have · Grammar · Learner-friendly corpora · Lesson plans · Using images from Amazon.com
Two-faced verbs
May 20th, 2008 · No Comments
I told a group of trainees during a session on ‘Time and Tense’ today that there are 6 troublesome words in English that cause confusion as a result of their two-faced nature: have, has, had, do, does and did. The problem is that sometimes they function as auxiliaries and other times they are main verbs.
Here […]
Tags: Auxiliaries · Grammar
