Future forms for C1-C2
Here’s a quick activity for advanced learners to help you learn, brush up and think about some expressions and ways in which we can talk about the future.
Tag: Grammar
Different ways to use the verb Stop
Among some of the problems students come across when learning English, are those verbs that have more than one verb pattern with a change of meaning and ‘stop’ happens to be one of them. Here you’ll find a short presentation on ways to use ‘stop’. Afterwards, you can practise with the two different activities, one is for lower levels while the second activity is for students that are higher up on their knowledge of English. I hope you find the activity useful.
Below you will find the link to the lesson.
Click here for lessonBelow you’ll find a quiz for A2/B1 levels
Click for the quizBelow you’ll find a quiz for B2 levels
Confusing words: remember/remind
Here’s an entry on two words that very often confuse learners of English. In Spanish and Catalan both verbs ‘remind’ and ‘remember’ are mostly covered by recuerda (Spanish) and record (Catalan) like in Recuerdo haber dejado las llaves sobre la mesa or Recuérdale a Jorge que llame a su madre. However, in English here we’d use different verbs, I remember leaving the keys on top of the table and Remind Jorge to call his mother. Things can even get a little worse in the case of ‘remember’ and its different verb patterns that change the meaning like in the examples below.
I remember leaving my keys on the table. (I have a mental picture of me doing this in the past)
I remembered to leave my keys on the table. (I didn’t forget to do this)
If you click on the lesson, you’ll get a short presentation on how to use both verbs. Afterwards, you can practise by doing the sentence completion task filling in the missing words.
Click here for the lessonThe causative: have/get something done
Causative structures are another form of passive structures where the focus is on something that is done rather than who does it. Here’s a video I made with bitable that will give you some tips on some of the different structures.
After, you can do a grammar activity to practise the structure.
Conditionals: 1st Conditional game
| Oh! This week we’re going to do some work on conditionals. So, just to get this structure under our belt, I’ve set up this fun activity with Wheel decide.
How to play? Click on the wheel and see what you get for the question ‘What will you do if …? Write down the sentence and spend a minute thinking about your answer, afterwards tell the class. Example: What will you do if the person you love asks you out? Possible answers: If the person I love asks me out, I will go crazy/faint/be extremely happy/buy myself something very smart/go to the hairdresser’s to look great. |
Word formation activity: Personality and behaviour vocabulary
How would you describe your best friend? Would you say he or she is kind? Does this person always treat people with great kindness? Does your friend always behave kindly in all the majority of situations? And have you ever seen this person be unkind? Here we’ve used the word kind, which is an adjective in different ways, as a noun, as an adverb and even with a negative prefix. To achieve a good level of English, you’ll have to be pretty good at noticing how a word is used or the type of word you will need to complete a sentence. You’ll also need to have a good knowledge on the use of prefixes and suffixes in order to change words from one class to another or even give them a negative meaning. The bad news is that there are quite a few rules and also quite a few exceptions to these rules, but the good news is that through practice, you’ll eventually achieve a reasonable degree of skill for this type of activity.
Every now and then, I’ll try to place some activities on the blog to cover this part of learning English. Please don’t leave this type of content until the day before your exams, as it is only through practice that word formation samples ‘will stick’.
Here’s an activity related to words that we could use to describe people’s characters and they way in which they behave.
English grammar: object pronouns
There always seems to be a little confusion with subject and object pronouns so here’s a short explainer video, made with bitable (which I really love), to give some help along with an activity you can do after.
