Teaching Guides

The usual mistake: presenting all twelve tenses as a table. Students memorise the table and cannot use any of them.

A better order: teach tenses in pairs that contrast, and always with a time expression attached.

First I go against I am going — habit against now. Then I went against I was going. Then, much later, I saw him yesterday against I have seen him.

The rule that saves most confusion: teach the time expression as part of the tense. Since and for belong with the present perfect; yesterday and last week belong with the simple past, and cannot appear with it. Students who learn the pairing rarely make the classic I have seen him yesterday error.

The usual mistake: giving all the rules at once. There are dozens, and no student holds them.

A better approach: teach one question — does my listener know which one I mean? If yes, the. If no, a or an. That single question is right most of the time.

Then add: an before a vowel sound, not a vowel letter. Practise an hour, a university, an honest man, a one-day trip until the sound principle is established.

Leave the exceptions — institutions, meals, geographical names — until the main pattern is secure. Introduced early, they persuade students the whole thing is arbitrary.

The usual mistake: treating them as a system to be reasoned about. Much of preposition use is arbitrary, and students who look for logic conclude they are stupid when they cannot find it.

Separate two categories explicitly. Tell the class which is which — it removes a great deal of frustration.

Category 1, where there is a picture: at is a point, on is a surface, in is inside. This works for time and place and can be drawn on the board.

Category 2, fixed partnerships: good at, interested in, depend on, apologise for. These have no logic and must be learnt as whole phrases, like vocabulary. Teach five a week, in sentences.

The usual mistake: setting the task and marking the result. The student who could already write does well; the student who could not learns only that they cannot.

Teach the form before the content. Notices have five parts, letters have a fixed layout, essays have a shape. Form is teachable with certainty, and it is a large share of the marks.

Never set a writing task cold. Understand the task, study a model, identify the structure, practise with guidance, then write alone. See Guided Writing.

Mark one thing. A script covered in corrections produces no change. One fault, clearly explained, with a rewrite of one paragraph, usually does.

Start from what they already produce. Take three sentences from their own written work and rebuild them on the board.

Teach joining before teaching complexity. Most weak writing is a string of short sentences or one long comma-spliced chain. Teaching and, but, so, because, although, which deliberately, one a week, changes writing more than any other grammar teaching.

Use the sentence-combining exercise. Give two short sentences; ask for three different ways of joining them. It is quick, it works at every level, and it can be done orally with a whole class.

Five words a week, not fifty. Each in a sentence the student writes about their own life.

Teach word families, not single words. decide, decision, decisive — three words for the effort of one.

Teach prefixes and suffixes explicitly. Twenty of them unlock hundreds of words, and they are teachable in six lessons.

Revisit deliberately. Last week's five words at the start of each new week. Without the return, the words are gone by the end of the month.