Practical Grammar Activities
Here are the abstract, bio data and handout for this presentation given at APAC 2010, TESOL Spain 2010, IATEFL Harrogate 2010 and ACEIA. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page you’ll find a link to the powerpoint presentation. Handout Premise
Learn English Punctuation - English Punctuation Rules
For example:-"Could everyone sit down please," said the teacher. Another general rule is to use a comma after the introduction to quoted speech or writing. For example:- Jamie said, "I love you." Sometimes when writing a spoken sentence it is split in two. The speech marks must then be placed at the beginning and end of each part of the sentence.
Buffalo 2nd-graders learn grammar by correcting NFL players' tweets
Second-graders at Buffalo, New York’s Elmwood Franklin School took a break from practicing addition and learning about George Washington last week and jumped into an unusual spelling and grammar lesson: correcting NFL players’ typo-filled tweets. San Francisco 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver, who also made headlines this week with an anti-gay remark, attracted the students’ attention by writing on Twitter that “I pray to God I’m never dieing broke” [sic]. A fan tweeted back: “Ask him for spellcheck while you’re at it.” The kids, however, fixed the mistake and proudly held up their corrected posterboard for a Facebook photo. The students “applied their lessons in proper sentence structure, noun and verb usage, spelling, and punctuation to correct the tweets of professional football players,” the school’s official Facebook page said. “The students partnered in groups and together found several mistakes in these tweets, including the incorrect spelling of ‘a lot.’”
Why Learn to Punctuate?
Why should you learn to punctuate properly? After all, many people have made successful careers without ever learning the difference between a colon and a semicolon. Perhaps you consider punctuation to be an inconsequential bit of decoration, not worth spending your valuable time on. Or perhaps you even regard punctuation as a deeply personal matter — a mode of self-expression not unlike your taste in clothes or music. Well, punctuation is one aspect of written English.
Steven Pinker Identifies 10 Breakable Grammatical Rules: "Who" Vs. "Whom," Dangling Modifiers & More
We’ve previously featured Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker discussing writing at a Harvard conference on the subject. In that case, the focus was narrowly on academic writing, which, he has uncontroversially claimed, “stinks.” Now—“not content with just poaching” in the land of the scribes, writes Charles McGrath at The New York Times Sunday Book Review—Pinker has dared to “set himself up as a gamekeeper” with a new book—The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. The grandiose title suggests to McGrath that the scientist intends to supplant that most venerable, and most dated, classic writer’s text by Strunk and White.
The Basics of Punctuation
Punctuation is the system of signs or symbols given to a reader to show how a sentence is constructed and how it should be read. Sentences are the building blocks used to construct written accounts. They are complete statements. Punctuation shows how the sentence should be read and makes the meaning clear. Every sentence should include, at least, a capital letter at the start a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark at the end.
Board Games. Free Printable ESL board game templates.
Present Perfect Board Game. A4 SizeStudents talk about their lives and experiences. Good for pre-intermediate level students learning the present perfect or for more advanced students wishing to revise it. Snakes and Ladders master version. A4 SizeThis is a master copy version of the game used in some of the activities in the board games section.
ESL Games and Game Board
The ESL game boards found on this page are in the form of Microsoft Word documents. It may take a few second to open. Just click, print, and photocopy. A great motivating TEFL activity. Word Skills: Review synonyms, antonyms, beginning sounds, ending sounds, middle sounds, and rhymes. Guess What: Practise the word skill of saying what things are using relative clauses such as a person who, a place where, a time when, and a thing that.
Back-to-the-Future tense: Big Bang Theory and Douglas Adams on time travel, verbs, and grammar
Still from The Big Bang Theory, Episode 164 A recent episode of The Big Bang Theory shows Sheldon, Leonard, Raj, and Howard watching Back to the Future, Part II and discussing the appropriate tense to use when talking about something that happened in an alternate past timeline. Here's the scene, with a transcript via Harrison Tran. Howard: Wait, hold on.
