Teacher Discussion Forums

As a fairly new teacher I'm looking for practical teaching suggestions. Right now I'm reading Explaining English Grammar by George Yule and Using the Board in the Language Classroom by Jeannine Dobbs.

I agree, it's a difficult issue for me because in the particular country where I live, the students DEMAND grammar rules. And the school's policy is: give the customer what they want. In the official teacher-training we were told not to give explicit grammar explanations/rules, but soon after that w...

Thanks lolwhites, I think you may have hit the nail on the head. What caused the problem was she was randomly thinking of an example sentence in the past perfect (we were talking about the 'duration' aspect, such as "I've been married for three years. (it's still true)" In her sentence , it's doesn'...

I'm trying to get a firmer grasp on present perfect explanations. And I think maybe I've been staring at this sentence for too long! So please help if you can. The sentence, from from a student: "I've been to Italy for three months." My viewpoint is that: -I've been to Italy. -- is fine. talking abo...

All things being equal, an Italian student will progress faster than a Chinese student, the same way a native English speaker will reach say, intermediate level, much faster in Italian than they will in Chinese. This little article discusses this mostly from the point-of-view of native English speak...

I'm replying to my own post here...

I suppose "what happened" is best since the answer to that question isn't in the present perfect? Normally if you said, "What's happened?" the person would reply, "I've been in a car accident" instead of "I was in a car accident." ???

a. What happened?
b. What's happened?

-- I was in a car accident!

"a" is the answer that is "correct" (this is from a pre-made test I have to give my students).

How to explain why "what's happened" is not the best answer other than "that's just the way it is!"

Help!

Maybe you've already done this one, but one activity that is fun with comparatives is to play a "boasting" game where students have to boast about how whatever they have is better than another's. However it's good to ban the use of the word "better" so the students have to use more varied words. For...

When I hear, "I spoke to 'the' cashier, it implies to me that there was only one cashier. For instance you can say, "I went to my son's school and spoke to a teacher" but you can't say, "I went to my son's school and spoke to a principal" since there is only one principal (at most schools, anyway). ...