A Lexical Chunk is a unit of language which is made up of two or more words. Here are a few examples of lexical chunks: Good morning. Nice to see you! What's the time? Other lexical chunks can include phrasal verbs, idioms, collocations and so on. Lexical chunks...
Emoticons are a modern form of English punctuation. Essentially they are a pictorial representation of a human face which are used to give nuance to a text. For example, I could write: See you on Thursday. In itself, this seems fairly innocuous. However, if next...
Although they look similar, dashes and hyphens are used very differently. In traditional typography, a hyphen is half the length of a dash although in handwriting and often on computer keyboards they are the same size. Hyphens are used in two ways: to split a word or...
Brackets and Parentheses are punctuation marks in English which everyone knows, but many people get wrong. Even native speakers. But before getting on to how to use them, we'll begin by explaining exactly what the difference between them are. Types of Bracket There...
A Colon is a punctuation mark in English. It consists of two round dots, one above the other (although occasionally these are small squares). The colon immediately follows the word before and there is a space between the colon and what follows. Note that the colon is...
A Grammar Nazi is a pedantic soul who takes pleasure in finding grammatical errors and pointing them out to people. Whether asked or not. Collectively they can be known as the Grammar Police. Grammar Nazis will know it is spelled grammar and not grammer. They will...
We can ask a direct question: What time is it? Or, if we want to be more formal or polite, we can ask an indirect question: Do you know what time it is? We make an indirect question by using a phrase and then a statement. Note that even though this is a question, we...
Sometimes we can have a sentence with 2 objects. We call these the direct objects and indirect objects. In sentences with 2 objects, the subject gives the direct object to the indirect object: {subject} + {verb} + {indirect object} + {direct object} I + bought +...
A paragraph is a collection of one or more sentences. It is used to group ideas in a piece of writing or text. A paragraph, then, is part of the structure of a text: 1 or more words > 1 or more sentences > 1 or more paragraphs = text There's no standard...
Commas are used as part of the punctuation system of English. This article describes how and when we use them. Talking generally we use commas in two main ways. First, to separate lists of words or similar items in a sentence: He was a big, bad, bald, belligerent,...
When we repeat what someone has said before, we usually use say or tell: Jeff said he was never going to eat meat again after that meal! Susan told us the most amusing story about the pigeons in her garden. And with direct speech we almost always use say: "No," said...
Quotation Marks or Inverted Commas (known more informally as Speech Marks) are used in writing to show what someone actually says. They separate actual speech from comment, in other words. John F. Kennedy said, "Change is the law of life. And those who look only to...
This page describes the typographical conventions we use in the Grammar Guide and generally on the ICAL TEFL site. Examples Examples are shown thus: This is a grammar example. Following common convention, ungrammatical sentences are marked with an asterisk: * This is...
Grammatical Case is used to talk about how nouns and, especially, pronouns change their form when they have a different role in a sentence. For example, look at these: John loves Leslie.Leslie loves John. The subject of the first sentence is John. The object of...
Possessive Apostrophes are added to the end of a noun to show possession. This car belongs to John. It is John's car. That dog belongs to that girl. It is that girl's dog. Note, a Possessive Apostrophe is sometimes known as a Saxon Genitive. Plural Nouns If there is...
The Oxford Comma (sometimes known as the Serial Comma or the Harvard Comma) causes a lot of debate and controversy in grammatical circles. On the one hand is British English where a list of items in a sentence are separated by commas unless there is a coordinating...
Tag Mix is a straightforward way to practice question tags with your class. It is all about having students identify the two parts of the sentence (the statement and the tag) and then mixing and matching them. As an activity it works best with intermediate and above...
Sentence Completion is a TEFL activity which can be used to practice different forms of sentences. It works well with different verb forms, conditionals and so on. Preparation Write out a series of sentences which are examples of the kind of sentence/verb...
The Conditional Mood is the form of the verb used in conditional sentences to refer to a hypothetical situation or an uncertain event that is dependent on another set of circumstances. In other words, the conditional mood talks about something which might happen if...
This article gives the rules and conventions when it comes to Punctuating Direct Speech, that is the words actually spoken by someone, i.e. direct speech. Inverted Commas Inverted Commas or Quotation Marks are used to enclose whatever someone says. Note that other...
Ellipsis (plural ellipses) is a punctuation mark or series of marks that usually show something is missing. For example, ellipsis: indicates an intentional omission of a word or words in a text at the end of a sentence, it indicates a trailing off into silence or an...
The subject of Teaching Grammar is often discussed and there are many different views and approaches. New teachers often feel that to properly teach a language they must teach grammar. However this is not the case. Background In the past it was thought that students...
He Said She Said Circle is a simple activity for students to practice their reported speech (also known as indirect speech). Ideally you should run this activity after a lesson where students have been working on reported speech. If not, you should quickly run over...
An Independent Clause looks just like a short sentence and follows the usual English pattern for sentences: The door opened. We won! I love cats. But... while a sentence stands on its own, an independent clause sits inside another sentence. For example, those...
SOV stands for: {subject} + {object} + {verb} * I + dinner + made. * We + car + buy. * an asterisk at the beginning of a sentence shows it's ungrammatical In this sentence structure the subject comes first, the object second, and the verb third. English is not an SOV...
A Question Mark or ? is a punctuation mark used at the end of a sentence to show that it is a question. It is, if you like, the written equivalent of a rising intonation which, in most languages, shows we are asking for information of someone. When do we use...
An Exclamation Mark or ! is a punctuation symbol used at the end of a sentence to denote strong feeling: surprise, anger, exuberance: I love you! Get out! I won! It is sometimes known as a bang, a screamer, a shriek, a slammer, a startler, or a pling. Some...
A Period (AmE) or Full Stop (BrE) is a punctuation mark placed at the end of a sentence. The symbol itself comes from Aristophanes of Byzantium who invented the system of punctuation where the height of placement of a dot on the line determined its meaning. A dot...
Very simply put, the Second Conditional is used to talk about possible, but unlikely, situations and wondering what would happen. The little girl in the picture might think... If I had a bike, I would go out and play with my friends. But she doesn't have a bike so she...
Subject-Verb Agreement means that a singular subject takes a singular verb and a plural subject takes a plural verb. For example: My brother is in town. My brothers are in town. In the first example the subject is singular: my brother. This makes the verb singular:...
