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Entries Tagged as 'Grammar'

Another book cover puzzle

March 11th, 2009 · 1 Comment

One of the title words on the book cover below has been covered up. Can you work out what the word is?

Here is an excerpt from the synopsis:
What is Health _ _ _ _ _ _ _ about?
Health _ _ _ _ _ _ _ is an innovative new book about lifestyle, disease risks, diseases […]

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Tags: Grammar · Lesson plans · Third person singular

Tense review activity (a lesson plan)

February 19th, 2009 · 11 Comments

Sometimes students tell me that they would like to do a revision lesson. I ask them what they would like to revise and they say, “Verbs, of course”. Then I say, “What aspect of verbs would you like to revise?” and they reply, “Oh, you know - the past, the present, the future, and things […]

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Tags: Can and could · Grammar · Lesson plans · Past simple · Present continuous · Present perfect · Present perfect continuous · Present simple · Student drawings

Capture the context

January 28th, 2009 · 1 Comment

I just posted a teaching idea on teflclips called Guess the context. The basic activity involves giving students a line from a film clip and asking them to guess who is speaking and what is happening.
I use this technique to demonstrate to students the importance of context. I think that a language learners’ appreciation of […]

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Tags: Grammar · Lesson plans · Using context

Wordcount

January 10th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Wordcount is a beautiful squeaky-clean representation of the 86,800 most frequent words in English (data is taken from the British National Corpus).

This is the best representation of a word list I have ever seen. As you can see, the word list is presented as a long horizontal chain. The more common a word in the […]

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Tags: Grammar · Infinitive of purpose · Learner-friendly corpora · Reading · Vocabulary

Wordle for short texts (lesson plan)

December 11th, 2008 · 6 Comments

Below, you will find 10 sentences about the blue whale. Unfortunately, the words are mixed up. Can you put them in the correct order? (You will probably need a pen and a piece of paper for this).
Number one:

Number two:

Number three:

Number four (in this case, the word ‘as‘ must be used twice):

Number five:

Number six:

Number seven:

Number eight […]

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Tags: Adjectives · Comparison · Grammar · Lesson plans · Wordle

Another parser breakdown

December 3rd, 2008 · 2 Comments

English grammar books tell us that in cases when a defining relative clause is the subject, the relative pronoun can be omitted. This potentially confusing point is best demonstrated by the following song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY8nRfEnWtc

“You’re the one that I want” (relative pronoun present)
“You are the one I want” (relative pronoun absent)
Last week, I wrote a posting about […]

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Tags: Grammar