Real English Video Lessons

Here’s a great website that has fun and interesting videos that are specifically made for the ESL learner.  Even advanced students will enjoy starting from lesson 1 and working their way up to the most advanced lessons.  Many of the videos come with accompanying activity sheets that you can use to help you understand the [...]

Perfect Modals

Perfect Modals are used to express events or actions that could have happened in the past, but for whatever reason something occured that altered that possibility.  For instance: “I should have locked my car doors, but I didn’t so my purse was stolen.”  You can also use them in the negative form: “I shouldn’t have left my [...]

Conditional Sentences

Conditional Sentences are also referred to as “If Clauses” and they express the action in the main clause that can only exist if certain conditions are fulfilled.  There are three main types of Conditional Sentences: future, present, and past. www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar/conditional-sentences www.englishpage.com/conditional/conditionalintro.html http://a4esl.org/q/h/vm/if-clauses.html www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/grammar/if.htm

Direct Objects

A Direct Object is the noun or phrase that receives the action that is performed by the subject.  It answers the “who” or ”what” after an action verb. For example: Bob crashed the car.  What did Bob crash?  The car.  So, “the car” is the direct object in the original sentence. You can also have mulitple direct [...]

Possessive Pronouns

Possessive Pronouns are used in place of nouns when showing ownership: my, mine, your, yours, his, her, hers, its, ours, their, theirs, and whose.  You do not use an apostrophe for possessive pronouns (That book is his.) like you would with nouns (That is Bob’s book.) http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000023.htm http://a4esl.org/q/h/vc-pronouns-lb.html www.usingenglish.com/quizzes/62.html www.english-test.net/esl/learn/english/grammar/ei101/esl-test.php

Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Every year on September 19th the world celebrates Talk Like a Pirate Day!  Well, maybe not the entire world, but Talk Like a Pirate Day gets more and more popular every year.  Pirate talk uses an old English dialect that you now only see in movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, but many of the [...]

Superlative Adjectives

Superlative Adjectives are used to describe the most extreme degrees of a noun.  They usually end in “est” or have “most/least” before them. For example: the biggest hamburger, the smallest car, the most expensive house, or the least popular candidate. www.english-the-easy-way.com/Adjectives/Formation_SuperLative_Adjectives.htm www.english-the-easy-way.com/Adjectives/Grammar_Stucture_SuperLative_Adjectives.htm www.englishclub.com/grammar/adjectives-superlative.htm//www.eflnet.com/tutorials/adjcompsup.php www.eflnet.com/grammar/supadj.php

Modal Auxiliary Verbs: Should, Could, Would

Should, would, and could are modal verbs that often confuse second language students.  They are similar in nature, yet they are very different in their essential meanings. Should is used to give advice: “You should wear that shirt because it makes you look thinner.”  Could is used to ask permission: “Could I borrow that shirt [...]

Remembering September 11th

Most people will always remember exactly where they were when the September 11th attacks happened or how they first heard about the terrible events of that day.  As the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  So, in keeping with that idea, here is an interesting [...]

Word Order Practice

If you need practice placing the words in your English sentences in the correct order, then check out this link to learn some basic rules.  You can then click on the exercise links at the bottom of the page to test your skills.  Don’t forget to use correct punctuation and capitalization! www.english-4u.de/word_order.html

Get to Know Your Tenses

Understanding the difference between tenses is one of the most important things you need to learn when studying English.  Knowing whether a sentence is past tense, present tense, or future tense is essential to understanding its meaning.  Most new English speakers make the majority of their mistakes with their tenses (and therefore your teachers will [...]

Singular to Plural

Making singular words into plural words can be difficult to understand at times because there are so many different rules that can apply and exceptions to those rules…making it more complicated than it needs to be!  For instance, most words become plural simply by adding an “s” to the end (hat/hats, car/cars, envelope/envelopes).  However, words [...]

Question Words

Who, what, where, when, why, and how…are all question words.  You need these question words in order to ask questions.  Sometimes people who are just learning how to speak English get confused on which question words to use and when to use them in order to ask certain questions.  “Where are we going?” and “When are [...]