Contents About the series 4 About the authoi 5 Foreword 6 Introduction 7 Key grammatical terminology 14 The sounds of British English 18 1 Singular and plural 19 2 Countable and uncountable nouns 23 3 Containers, quantities and pieces 27 4 Subject and object pronouns 31 5 Reflexive pronouns 36 6 Possessives 39 7 This, that, these, those 43 8 Articles 46 9 Some and any 52 10 Much, many, a lot of, lots of, plenty of, a great deal of 57 11 Few and a few; little and a little 59 12 Other quantifiers 61 13 Adjective order 64 14 Comparatives 66 15 Superlatives 71 16 Comparisons: as .. . as, not as . . . as, the same as, like 76 17 Comparisons: too and enough 79 18 Prepositions of place 84 19 Prepositions of movement 88 20 Prepositions of time 91 21 Have and have got 94 22 Present simple: be 97 23 Present simple: affirmative 101 24 Present simple: negative 107 25 Present simple: questions 109 26 Imperatives 112 27 Adverbs of frequency 115 28 Present progressive: affirmative (‘now’ meaning) 118 29 Present progressive: negative and questions 124 30 Present progressive contrasted with present simple 127 31 Past simple: be 129 32 Past simple: regular verbs 132 33 Past simple: irregular verbs 139 2 Contents 34 Past simple: questions and short answers 142 35 Past simple: negative 145 36 Past progressive:‘in progress’ 147 37 Past progressive: ‘interrupted actions’ 152 38 Present perfect: Have you ever...? 155 39 Present perfect: just 159 40 Present perfect: ‘up to now’ 161 41 Time words: already,yet and always 166 42 Time words: for and since 169 43 Present perfect progressive 172 44 Past perfect simple 176 45 Past perfect progressive 182 46 Will 186 47 Going to 193 48 Will contrasted with going to 199 49 Present progressive: ‘future arrangements’ 203 50 Future progressive and future perfect 206 51 Requests, orders, offers, permission: can,c ould, will, would, may, might 211 52 Ability: can, can’t, could, couldn’t, be able to 215 53 Obligation and compulsion: must, have to, should, ought 218 54 Possibility and certainty: may, might, could, must, must have, can’t, can’t have 223 55 Modal verbs: an overview 228 56 Zero conditional 231 57 First conditional 234 58 Second conditional 237 59 Third conditional 240 60 Passives 243 61 Causatives 248 62 Multi-word verbs 250 63 Direct and reported speech 255 64 Used to 260 65 Question tags 263 66 Relative pronouns and relative clauses 267 67 Defining and non-defining relative clauses 273 68 ’d better / had better 277 69 Two-verb structures: -ing or infinitive? 280 70 In case 284 Further reading 287 3 About the series Macmillan Books for Teachers Welcome to Macmillan Books for Teachers. The titles are written by acknowledged and innovative leaders in each field to help you develop your teaching repertoire, practical skill and theoretical knowledge. Suited to both newer and to more experienced teachers, the series combines the best of classic teaching methodology with recent, cutting-edge developments. Insights from academic research are combined with hands-on experience to create books with focus on real-world teaching solutions. We hope you will find the ideas in them a source of inspiration in your own teaching and enjoyment in your professional learning. Adrian Underhill Titles in the series 500 Activities for the Learning Teaching Primary Classroom Jim Scrivener Carol Read Sound Foundations 700 Classroom Activities Adrian Underhill David Seymour & Maria Popova Teaching Practice AnA-ZofELT Roger Gower, Diane Phillips & Scott Thornbury Steve Walters Blended Learning Teaching Reading Skills Pete Sharma & Barney Barrett Christine Nuttall Beyond the Sentence Uncovering CLIL Scott Thornbury Peeter Mehisto, David Marsh & Maria Jesus Frigols Children Learning English Jayne Moon Uncovering EAP Sam McCarter & Phil Jakes Discover English Rod Bolitho & Brian Tomlinson Uncovering Grammar Scott Thornbury About the author Jim Scrivener has worked in many different countries, including two years in Kenya, three in the USSR and seven in Hungary. He has been Head of Teacher Training for International House Hastings, Director of Education for IH Budapest and is currently Head of Teacher Development for Bell International, where he designed the Online Delta course. He was leader of the team that designed the Euro exams and has been actively involved with Cambridge ESOL exams including design of their online teacher portfolio. He is married to Noemi and has two adult sons, Alex and Ben, and a young daughter, Maisie. He can be very boring about Bob Dylan if you give him half a chance. 5 Foreword Teachers frequently need to present new grammar to learners and grammar presentations are often at the heart of language lessons. This is part of the current general ‘communicative’ methodology, and is embodied or assumed in most current materials. Coursebooks usually provide ‘ready-made’ presentations, but teachers often want to strengthen or supplement the grammatical explanations in order to meet the particular learning events in their own classrooms. And when other materials like a reading text or an online activity are being used, there can be multiple situations in which further elucidation of a grammatical structure may be required. When this occurs a teacher has to decide w7hether it is appropriate to deal with this and if so howT to insert it elegantly into ongoing work, and whether to do it now or later. This places a constant demand on teachers to identify quickly: 1) the new7 structure and its possible forms 2) the meanings imparted by the structures in context 3) the core of what the student needs to learn 4) and then, crucially, ways to present and practise the structure and to check that the core concepts are understood. Teaching English Grammar aims to help teachers meet these demands by offering quick access to key aspects of structures, ready-to-use presentation ideas, contexts for first and subsequent exposure to new language and insights on checking understanding. Teachers with less experience often struggle with providing contexts for the new language they are presenting, and the activities here aim to provide simple and effective situational contexts for such language at this point in the lesson. This is important, because if the situation is chosen so that the human meanings conveyed within it are compelling and transparent, then the meaning of the grammatical point can almost ‘teach itself’, reducing the need for verbal re-explanation from the teacher, and allowing the teacher to attend to the practice of the forms of the structure. At this point the teacher faces a second challenge: incisive checking of learners’ understanding of the language point. The agile selection and use of concept questions to do this is also a crucial and often elusive skill for a new teacher to develop, the lack of which easily leads instead to a habitualised over-reliance on the misleading question ‘Do you understand?’The illustrative concept questions in this book aim to help teachers to develop their confidence and facility in using these to check understanding. More experienced teachers will be able to use the material here to review7 and overhaul the texture and elegance of their repertoire of presentation activities and approaches, streamlining their approach and developing their confidence and effectiveness. Adrian Underhill Series Editor Introduction This book gathers together practical teaching ideas and key information about language in order to help you prepare and teach grammar lessons. I hope that it will save you time, energy and stress and help you to feel more confident, well- informed and one step ahead of the students. Modern coursebooks are generally excellent but sometimes we (and our students) feel the need to step away from their texts and exercises. Rather than using coursebook material to introduce a new grammar point, you may want to do a ‘books closed’ presentation on the board - or add in an extra practice activity. You will find lots of ideas here to help you present and practise grammar points. Presentation The Presentation ideas in this book usually involve the teacher upfront, introducing and modelling language items, possibly using the board. They are particularly suitable for working with language items your class has not met or studied before. Many of them involve creating a context or situation which will help to exemplify the meaning and use of the target items. Practice The Practice ideas are based around students using the language themselves. These sections list a range of possible ideas you could use to practise various features of meaning and form. They are not intended as a sequence of activities to be used in a single lesson. Select the idea most relevant for your lesson and your class. It’s worth noting that this division into presentation and practice is somewhat arbitrary. Many teachers prefer to introduce newr items through activities that involve lots of student language use and less teacher modelling or explanation. Depending on your own teaching approach, you may find that you prefer to use ideas from the practice sections to introduce new language. All the teaching ideas are given as quite brief notes. There are many steps that I do not mention and I have to assume that you will fill in missing details yourself - and in doing so you can start to make the ideas your own and more relevant for your class. For example, to avoid repetition I have not usually stated that you need to use concept questions in presentations or that it’s important to focus on form - but please assume that both of these steps are usually necessary. The Presentation sections mainly describe situations or contexts to help you present the meaning and use of the language. However, you will invariably also need to focus on the way that the item is structured, even if that is not explicitly stated. You may find that some ideas seem unsuitable for your class as they stand - but I hope that they can still inspire you to think of other related activities that are suitable. 7 Some key notions in presentation and practice Contexts Many of the presentations in this book make use of a context. These are simple, easy-to-convey situations, scenes or stories that will help to clarify the meaning or use of a language item. You can create the context by drawing pictures on the board, holding up flashcards of photos or sketches or by creating a mini-situation in class using students to act out simple roles following your instructions. A really good context will seem to lead inevitably to natural use of the target language. Typically, after creating a context, you might elicit language from the students to see if they already have any idea about the target language. If they don’t, it allows you to model the new language yourself. Eliciting You elicit by giving cues (asking a question, miming, showing a picture, giving a keyword, etc) that encourage the students to say something themselves - perhaps in order to draw out their ideas or to see what they know of the target language you are wTorking on. This may help to involve students in a lesson, as they will be doing more than simply listening to you speaking. They can also show7 wrhat they already know7 and this can help you to adjust the level of the work. Eliciting can help to reduce the amount of unnecessary teacher talk in class. Modelling You model by saying something aloud once or a number of times because you want the class to hear a well-pronounced example of a language item. You should take care to speak as naturally as possible and not artificially exaggerate any features. Drilling You drill by modelling a sentence (perhaps to exemplify a specific grammatical item) then getting the students to repeat - often chorally (ie as a whole class). Alternatively, you could also ask different individuals to repeat - or pairs to say the sentence(s) to each other. Drilling is a very restricted use of language to help students notice, focus on and improve things like verb endings, word order, pronunciation etc. If a student repeats incorrectly during a drill it is usually helpful to correct. Don’t worry too much about drilling being an unrealistic or £non-communicative’ use of language - or that the students might be rather unnaturally over-using target items. This type of controlled manipulation of language items is very useful. Story / Dialogue building You can build a short story or dialogue that includes examples of language you want the students to learn. Use the board or pictures to introduce the context and characters and then model (or elicit) lines of the story / dialogue, one by one - which the students can repeat. As the story / dialogue gets longer, students can recap and practise saying the whole thing. Introduction Pair work Students do pair work when each student in class works with one partner. Often the students in each pair are referred to as A and B. Pair work allows lots of students to speak and work simultaneously, maximising interaction time in class. Mingling In a mingling activity, each student in class stands up and walks around the room, meeting and talking to a number of other people - and perhaps after completing a task, moving on to meet others. Engagement Although teachers often worry about whether their lesson is £fun? or not, perhaps a more important consideration is whether it is engaging. Students will learn little or nothing if they do not find the work interesting and involving. It needs to attract them, fill their minds and hold their attention. This may be because the topic is relevant, the task is stimulating, the end result appeals to them - or for many other reasons. One key factor to bear in mind is to pitch the level of challenge appropriately - neither too high nor too low - and of course this level will vary for different people in your class and at different times. Creating the right challenge level may, for example, involve the teacher varying the difficulty of questions as they ask different people around the class. What are timelines - and how can I use them? Timelines are a simple visual aid that you (or a student) can quickly draw on the board. They make the flow of time visible - as a line moving from the left (past) through ‘now’ towards the right (the future). By adding other things to the line (eg an ‘X’ to indicate an event or a stick baby to show when someone was born) we can clarify when something happened and this can help learners to understand the uses of a tense or how one tense is different from another. Past Now Future Timelines are valuable both as (a) a teaching tool to introduce the meaning and use of verb tenses and (b) as a checking tool (like concept questions) to find out how much learners have understood. Use timelines as an aid when explaining the meaning and use of a tense. Ask concept questions based on the timelines. Try using incomplete timelines as a way of eliciting ideas from students (When do you think it happened?). Invite students to come to the board to draw their suggested timelines - and let other students agree or disagree - and make alternative suggestions. Draw wrong timelines and invite students to correct you. Timelines are a great way 9 Introduction of clarifying and checking meaning. But just remember that their meaning may not be immediately transparent to everyone - and there may be different interpretations. Many students seem to find timelines very helpful but others may remain puzzled. Example sentences Where possible and appropriate, example sentences in the main text are real samples of language in use, taken from the Macmillan English Dictionary corpus. Most are exactly as listed in the corpus, but in some cases, they have been edited slightly in order to help focus on the language point being exemplified by removing or changing words that seem potentially confusing or distracting for the levels in which the lessons are likely to be taught. Even so, you may find some of the samples unusual - and may consider them unsuitable for their classes. For example, the present perfect examples include Someone has just waltzed off with my drink. This certainly isn’t the sort of example students typically come across - but, after just a little explanation of what a waltz is - and of the colloquial use meaning ‘steal’ - this is actually a very striking and visual example - and the sort of chunk of language that students tend to love learning by heart (which is halfway to getting to grips with the language). Of course, if you are not personally familiar with the meaning of an idiomatic use, then it’s sensible to avoid it - but, if you do know it, I encourage you to think about using real sentences like this as they stand (even if you do need to teach the meaning of a new verb or two) - not least because some of the odder or unexpected pictures they conjure up might be more memorable. Feedback and correction In order to get better at grammar, students need more than input and practice. They also need to get lots of feedback on how well they are doing. Encouragement is important, of course, but it’s also vital to give clear, truthful information about how well they use language. If a learner is constantly making a mistake (or could say things better than they are doing), it’s little help if the teacher keeps saying only ‘Good,’ ‘Well done,’ ‘Perfect’ and so on. We can distinguish some important ways of responding to errors. 1) Simply indicating that an error has been made (eg by raising your eyebrows or shaking your head) without correcting - in the hope of the learner - or a peer - being able to correct it themselves. The thinking processes involved in such self / peer correction may help long-term learning. 2) Indicating w7hat the mistake is - or wThere it is (eg by repeating an incorrect word with questioning intonation) without correcting (again, to encourage students to think and correct themselves). 3) Giving the correction, partly or wholly yourself (eg by saying a corrected verb form) and getting the learner to complete it or repeat it. 10