40 Irregular verbs in the past simple
Job occupations
What do you do? or… What do you do for a living?
Here’s a little quiz on job occupations for Basic levels of English.
Tag: A1
Stative verbs
Think or thinking ? Have or having? When dealing with stative verbs, we basically mean those verbs that describe a state instead of an action, but this can be a tricky thing and sometimes a verb belongs to both categories depending on context. When can we use these verbs in the progressive form? Here are a few tips along with a quiz.
Word order for adjectives
ADJECTIVES THAT GIVE INFORMATION ABOUT A NOUN (NOUN MODIFIERS)
We can give information about something by using adjectives.
- An Italian car.
- Dark hair.
These adjectives can come before a noun although they can also come after a verb. Here we are going to see them in front of a noun. (predicative position). Look at the boxes and after do the grammar activity.
We can use a lot of adjectives but in the English language we usually have a pattern of preference for which adjectives come first.
- A beautiful, red Italian car.
- Long curly dark hair.
… But which one comes first? There is a general rule according to the type of information the adjective is giving.
| ARTICLE/QUANTIFIER/NUMBER | SIZE | SHAPE | COLOUR | NOUN |
| – | long | curly | dark | hair |
| Two | big | – | yellow | scarves |
Or…
| A/Q/N | OPINION | AGE | SIZE | SHAPE | COLOUR | ORIGIN | MATERIAL | NOUN |
| – | long | curly | dark | hair | ||||
| Two | big | – | yellow | scarves | ||||
| An | ugly | old | square | grey | British | concrete | block of flats | |
| A | lovely | new | big | round | white | Spanish | wooden | table |
the more adjectives we add, the more complicated the things gets. We might have to give very long descriptions which would look something like the box above. Luckily, we don’t usually use this in speech because our interlocutor might start yawning.
Confusing words: to be or have
When learning a language we frequently translate from our own native tongue. This can be helpful on some occasions, but on many others it can lead us to make mistakes. One of the most typical mistakes made by Spanish speakers is to use Spanish structures like ‘Tengo veinte años’ instead of the English ‘to be _____ many years old’. Here’s a short grammar activity to give a little help with this common error. Hope it results useful.
Present tense of ‘to be’
Past simple and Past Continuous
Hello! Here are two graded activities for the use of these tenses when they appear together. One is for Basic levels and the second activity is for Intermediate.
