Teacher Discussion Forums

Are both of the following sentences grammatically correct ?
"I wish she would go out with me." "I wish she went out with me." Thanks in advance for your input.

Both are correctly used according to a leading Corpus source. However, "one more day" seems to be far more popular - a ratio of appoximately 10:1

Hello hereichina, Many adjectives are formed by verbs in the past participle: regular (interested, tired, prejudiced) or irregular (written, torn, broken). As my colega Juan states, these adjectives imply something was done to cause this condition: Someone or something has torn the curtain ACTIVE VO...

Some more interesting information,exploring the notion of the dummy subject/ weather"it" concept (taken from Wikipedia): Weather it In the phrase It is raining, the verb to rain is usually considered semantically impersonal, even though it appears as syntactically intransitive; in this view, the req...

For those interested in grammar: "It" is used as the subject of an impersonal verb: It is snowing. An "impersonal verb" is...a verb used with an indeterminate subject, commonly, in English, with the impersonal pronoun it; as, it rains; it snows I got these definitions from www.thefreedictionary.com ...

I share your admiration, Larry, for the professionals who are committed to teaching – no matter what the subject matter. Likewise, I also have a passion for the nuances of language and enjoy positive, lively discussions that attempt to make sense of it all (hopefully, the learning process for us wil...

I'm not going to get into a debate concerning the advisability of attempting to teach/pass along/faclitate to learners "rules" in language (or even whether they exist or not). Perhaps a better word might be "tendencies" - which most students tend (no pun intended) to take comfort in and might also f...

i don't see much of a difference between "more remote" "less certain" "less possible" "less likely", "more improbable". etc. The idea is to give students a clear idea of the difference and not to confuse them with complicated explanations. We should remember that their level of comprehension is NOT ...

i think the answer is that "can" implies that it's normally possible: "If you invest in China, it's possible to... etc" "Could" means it's a little less likely: "If you invest in China, it might ... etc" Of course if you used the subjunctive form, "If you invested in China, then "could" would be cle...

Yes, I agree. Trying to speak naturally is a challenging skill. This is particularly evident when translating. As for grammar, whenever we discuss a "rule" in class, I always remind students that there always seem to be exceptions - this not only allows for the real possiblity of a variation from th...

Since nobody uses this expression in the adverbial form ( "crystal clearly"), you would have to use "crystal clear" as an adjective: "I understand you. (It's) Crystal clear." That would be the simplest way to get around having to use the adverb of manner ("clearly"). I hope this is clear (crystal cl...

Larry, although it's true that "awkwardness" isn't lingustically criminal, it might be deemed something that a native speaker would never utter naturally and therefore, would be incorrect. Maybe the word RULE is a bit strong here. We could use the term USAGE. I still believe the problem lies in the ...

I agree that it sounds awkward, but i'm wondering if there is a rule for this. I suppose we could talk about a deliberate plan , " I'll be continuing to monitor your progress" . But I wonder if it is possible to say that anything "will be continuing to happen" on its own ? Such as, " It will be cont...