Auxiliary Verbs (from the Latin auxilio = to help; they are also known as helping verbs) are verbs used to change the tense, form mood and voice of other verbs. In other words, we add an auxiliary to a verb to turn it into a question, to put it into the past, to...
What If – third conditional activity
What If is an activity to practice the third conditional looking at impossible outcomes. Preparation Firstly select a famous historical event and prepare a summary of it in about 200 words (you can often find good summaries online in Wikipedia for example). Make...
Classroom Focus in TEFL
Classroom Focus is concerned with who is the main focus of teaching in the classroom. Essentially there are two possible foci: the teacher - the class is Teacher Centered the students - the class is Student Centered Traditionally classes have been Teacher Centered...
Past Continuous in English Grammar
The Past Continuous (also called the Past Progressive) is used in several different ways: interrupted actions in the past parallel actions in the past It is used to reference a continuous (long-term) action in the past: They were kissing when we walked in. He was...
Karaoke in the TEFL Classroom
The word Karaoke means empty orchestra from the Japanese Kara = empty and Oke (short for Okesutora) = orchestra. Karaoke tracks are without lead vocals. The lead vocals are provided by the performer singing the Karaoke song through a microphone. The song is played in...
Taboo Words and TEFL
Taboo Words (sometimes known as swearwords, curse words, or profanity) are those words and phrases which some people find shocking or offensive. They can often cause problems for TEFL teachers and learners of English. In general, the best advice is to avoid both...
Conjunctions In English Grammar
A conjunction (also known as connector or joiner) is a word used to join words, phrases, or clauses together to show their relationship in a sentence. There are 3 main types of conjunctions in English. Coordinating Conjunctions Coordinating conjunctions always...
What is a Clause?
We all know what a sentence is. But it's useful to break a sentence down and talk about Clauses as well when you're teaching English. These are, essentially, the building blocks of sentences and each sentence contains one or more clauses. a sentence = one or more...
Phrasal Verbs in English
A phrasal verb is a verb and preposition which together mean something different from the individual parts. For example: The little boy was racing along the corridor when he ran into his teacher. In this example the boy was running and he literally ran into his...
Giving Instructions when Teaching English
{youtube}xOEMd8uenVI{/youtube}There is a right way and a wrong way to give instructions in your classroom. If you give instructions the wrong way you'll end up with a class who don't know what's going on. It's not rocket science, but it can make the difference between...