English Teacher X - Grammar Slammer: How to Explain the Hard Stuff and Impress Difficult and Demanding Students

They just want to establish whether youre a knowledgeable teacher or just another useless fuckoff backpacker who has come over to find an internet-order bride. If theyre being forced to study by their employers, their parents, or their government, well, then they want to test you just out of general hostility. Of course, as I have recommended in other books: you dont need to answer their questions, or at least you dont need to answer their questions directly. Tell them to look it up and then explain it to you. Or ask if anybody in the class knows the answer to that question. Elicitation, we TEFL pros like to call it.

But, suppose youve decided that you actually want to you learn a thing or two about grammar, just so you can shut those annoying bastards up once and for all. Or maybe youve just begun to realize that theres no hope of you getting any other job than English teaching abroad, so you want to learn your stuff. Okay, youve come to the right place. English Teacher X is, as usual, here to help. AUTHORS NOTE AND DISCLAIMER This book of course was not intended to be a comprehensive examination of all aspects of the grammar of the English language. Its intended to be a book that addresses the most common grammatical issues that arise in TEFL courses, and thats about it.

Im not going to deal with arcane stuff like subjunctive moods because not only are they difficult, they just dont come up in a typical TEFL class very often. Now, another point: the grammatical terms and expressions that I use are basically just the ones that I have found to be the most common and the easiest to use and remember. The present progressive and the present continuous are the same thing, but Ive found the term present continuous to be more common, so I generally use that. The term past participle of the verb is a lot more opaque than just calling it the third form, so I mostly do that. The explanations are the ones that I have found to be both the easiest to present and easiest for the students to understand.

WHAT WERE GOING TO DO HERE

Ill arrange the lessons in this book accordingly: HOW TO PRESENT IT Im going to present dialogues telling you what you should say and what the students will probably say.

WHAT WERE GOING TO DO HERE

Ill arrange the lessons in this book accordingly: HOW TO PRESENT IT Im going to present dialogues telling you what you should say and what the students will probably say.

This of course will contain plenty of my trademark juvenile humor. Needless to say you should remove that for your classroom presentations. I offer it only for the reason Mary Poppins gave a spoonful of sugar with the kids medicine. HOW TO PRACTICE IT I will give some ways to practice the forms presented, usually in two different ways: DRILLS Drills are very useful to pound these forms in the students heads. A drill will be defined as an activity where you are speaking and the students are responding together, chorally, or perhaps one student at a time, according to prescribed formulas for response. Theyve kind of gone out of style, I think, in the larger world of TEFL, but are a good way to practice and perfect forms and kill a bit of time here or there.

SPEAKING I will give a few very brief ideas on speaking activities you can do to practice the forms in question. These are usually present as questions or question formulas that you can use for pair work speaking, or for questions that you ask individual students, or vice-versa. For more information on that subject, take a look at my book SPEAKING ACTIVITIES THAT DONT SUCK .

PART ONE: FIRST THINGS FIRST

To be loose with grammar is to be loose with the worst woman in the world. Otis C. Edwards Okay, first: GRAMMAR is spelled grammAr, not grammEr.