A list of what is available on this blog.
- For songs and posts related to songs, see the Songs page
- For exercise generators etc., see the Teacher tools page
- For posts related -ize / -ise verbs, see the -ize / -ise page
- For explanations and exercises for learners, see next section.
- For posts about usage, controversies, history, and language in general, see the General sections
For students of English
Common errors learners make
Collocations and finding language in context
- Finding language in context - academic language
- Finding collocations and language in context using web tools
- Finding collocations and language in context using Google site search
Quick quizzes - multiple choice
Quick quizzes - sorting
Quick quizzes - matching
Vocab games - matching and memory games
Random quizzes - multifunctional exercises
- Conditionals
- Phrasal verbs
- Articles
- Confusing words
- Prepositions
- Dependent prepositions - after verbs
- Dependent prepositions - after adjectives
- Dependent prepositions - after nouns
Random vocab quizzes - multifunctional exercises
Vocab quizzes - multifunctional exercises
Exploring grammar
These are not so much lessons as my attempts to understand quite big topics of grammar.
- Exploring inversion and fronting
- Exploring concession and contrast
- Exploring determiners
- Verb types
- Exploring misplaced and dangling modifiers - with exercises
- Clauses and how they are connected
- The subjunctive
Random stories - exercises
Grammar - verb types
- Verbs with two objects
- Hot verbs, empty verbs, light verbs
- Stative (state) verbs
- Verb types
- Verbs ending in -en, from adjectives
- Ergative verbs - What on earth are they?
- Linking verbs - lesson and exercises
- Mostly causatives - have, get, let and make etc
- Verbs from prepositions - exercise
Grammar - verb forms
- The twelve tense system in English
- Present perfect or past simple
- Future in the Past - lesson and exercises
Grammar - modal verbs
Grammar - verbs - the passive
- Infinitives after passives
- Passive reporting structures
- Introduction to the passive
- A Passive Christmas Day - practise the passive
Grammar - discussions about the passive
- More random thoughts on examples of the passive
- On (mis)identifying the passive
- Silly passives that have been seen (by me)
Grammar - non-finite verb forms
- Reduced relative clauses - lesson and exercises
- Exploring gerunds and gerund phrases
- Participles and participle clauses
Grammar - verb patterns - -ing or infinitive etc
Grammar - phrasal verbs
- Phrasal verb or multi-word verb - is there a difference?
- Phrasal verbs that are always separated
- To separate or not (2), a little experiment
- To separate or not (1) - get something across
- Random Quiz - phrasal verbs
- Random stories - three part phrasal verbs
- Phrasal verbs with get
- Phrasal verbs with give
- Phrasal verbs with go
- Phrasal verbs with take
- Three-part phrasal verbs - story exercise
- Prepositional verbs - story exercise
- Three-part phrasal verbs - exercise
- Prepositional verbs - lesson
Grammar - talking about the future
Grammar - emphasis
- Inversion with so, such and as - exercises
- Fronting exercises (with a bit of subject-verb inversion)
- Exploring inversion and fronting
- Emphasis - focussing with cleft sentences
- Emphatic do, does, did and other auxiliaries
- Negative inversion - practice exercises
- Making sense of negative inversion. Hopefully! - lesson and exercises
Grammar - adverbial clauses
Grammar - conditionals, if clauses and unreal past
- Inversion in conditionals
- Zero conditionals - there's more to it than water boiling at 100°C
- More on conditionals - 3rd and Mixed
- Beyond 1,2,3 - conditionals in The Little Prince
- Beyond 1,2,3 - the conditionals that don't fit the system
- Word corner - would
- Unreal Past
- Revising I wish and If only
- Random quiz - Conditionals
- "If you thought that, you thought wrong" - a special type of if clause
- Beyoncé - If I were a boy - Conditionals
- Joan Osborne - One of us - Second conditional
- Maybe if we sang a song we'd learn conditionals quicker
Grammar - relative clauses and pronouns
- Non-defining relative clauses, sentential relative clauses, connective relative clauses
- Defining relative clauses - short exercise
- Relative infinitive clauses
- Exploring co-ordinate relative clauses
- Reduced relative clauses - lesson and exercises
- Q and A - When do we use that instead of who and which
- Defining relative clauses - short exercise
- The which-hunting season is on us again - discussion
Grammar - noun clauses
- Exploring nominal relative clauses and interrogative wh-clauses
- Exploring gerunds and gerund phrases
Grammar - adjectives and adverbs
- Forming negative adjectives with prefixes
- Extreme adjective matching game
- Gradable and ungradable - a lesson
- Gradable or ungradable - a list of gradable and ungradable adjectives
- Intensifiers
- Adjectives followed by infinitives
Grammar - determiners / pronouns
- Exploring determiners
- Pronouns and determiners - an overview
- Demonstratives - this, that, these, those
- Indefinite determiners and pronouns - some, any, no, none, somebody, anybody, nobody etc
- Confusing words - another, other, different, next etc
Grammar - determiners - articles
- Articles with place names - the basics - principles and tables
- Articles with place names - quiz
- Articles - a or an - quiz
- Random quiz - Articles
- a or an - exercise (older)
Grammar - determiners - quantifiers
Grammar - discussions on using singular or plural verbs with certain quantifying expressions
- Some random thoughts on 'a wide range of'
- a number of ... etc - is or are?
- a succession of - singular or plural - a discussion
Grammar - pronouns
- Read all about (the pronoun) it
- Personal pronouns - subject or object? - a discussion.
- Reflexive, emphatic and reciprocal pronouns - myself etc
- Singular they (in praise of) Singular they (discussion)
Grammar - lessons and exercises
- Reported speech
- Lesson on cause and effect, reason and result
- Prepositions, conjunctions and adverbs Telling the difference
- Whether (or not) to use whether (or not)
Grammar - question forms
Grammar - various
- Random lesson - non-assertive words plus a purposeful and
- Comparison with as and like
- Between and among
- Bits and pieces - partitive nouns - exercises
- Tag questions and short answers
- Advanced question tags
- Silly rules of English
Linking devices
Confusable words
- Near, nearby, close, next
- Confusing verbs - consist, include, make up, constitute, etc
- Confusing verbs -come, go, bring, take, get
- Confusing words - two top ten lists - matching exercises
- Relations, relatives and relationships
- A British perspective on further and farther
- Among and between
- Different, other, another, next
- There - adverb or introductory?
- care for, care about and take care of
- Confusable verbs - lie, lay and lie
- as and like
- compare to or compare with
- Confusable verbs - rise, raise and arise
Punctuation
Top Ten Words
- Confusing words - two top ten lists - matching exercises
- More intelligent words (Merriam-Webster)
- Top ten British words 2 (Merriam-Webster)
- Top ten 'simple but intelligent' words (Merriam-Webster)
- Top ten British words (Merriam-Webster)
Vocabulary - word formation
Vocabulary - various
- Britishisms
- The vocabulary of fraud, scams and business crime
- Advertising slogans, past and present
- Matching pairs with and
- Old wives tales and superstitions
- Cooking verbsg
- Gardens and gardening
Vocabulary - Word corner etc
- Word corner - hardly
- Word corner - would
- Word corner - just
- Word corner - need - nearly all you need too know
- Word corner - fair
- Word corner - antidisestablishmentarianism
- Uses of would and meanings of mean
- The verb mess - different meanings (song)
- The verb get - different meanings, idioms - several quizzes
- Various meanings of mate, wild (video)
Vocabulary - idioms
- Expressions with
etc - How I dealt to checking a New Zealand idiom
- Wintry idioms
- Idioms from horseracing and gambling
Vocabulary
- Types of humour
- A bugger of a quiz - multiple uses of a mild swearword
- Fraud and white-collar crime, etc - vocab
- Wedding vocabulary - vocab
- You are what you eat - vocab
Vocabulary - Christmas
- A Christmas quiz
- Christmas collocations
- More Christmas cracker jokes - six matching exercises
- A Passive Christmas Day - practise the passive
- Christmas crackers - 2 gapfill exercises
- Christmas cracker jokes - matching exercises
- It's behind you -Pantomime - A very British tradition
Vocabulary - expressions
Video materials
- Stonehenge (History Channel)
- Comedy sketch - Shiitake mushrooms
- Classic comedy sketch - Four Candles
- Galapagos penguins - mini-lesson
- The Long Johns and the Sub-prime crisis
- Gerald the gorilla - vocabulary, mate, wild
- Mr Mann's disappointed horse - vocab
Business
- Business buzzwords 1 - vocab
Q and A
- When do we use that instead of who or which?
- When do we use whom instead of who?
- Is outwith a word
- Does snow etc lay or lie?
General language posts
The history series
I've been taking a bit of a break from writing grammar posts recently, and looking at certain aspects of the history of English, with the help of online resources such as Google Books, Archive.org and Project Gutenberg. These posts are not really aimed at learners, but anyone who finds the history of English, and of those who commented on English, interesting.
- The team are - Collective nouns in British English
- A brief history of tense
- Outwith - collected quotes
Random thoughts on various expressions and their history
- 'Watching on" as an expression takes root
- Assist in or assist with?
- Early Doors
- Go missing
- hurt people and dictionaries
- Every little helps
- Random thoughts on had rather
- Random thoughts on time and tide wait for no man
- The origins of all of a sudden
- Having a think about another think coming
Non-standard?
- Random thoughts about on tomorrow
- Random thoughts - he was sat, she was stood, etc
- Random thoughts - tell about
Usage controversies
- Bites as bad as it barks
- First(ly) and more important(ly)
- Different to revisited
- Random thoughts on Mr Gwynne, sex and gender
- Random thoughts - on the cusp
- 'Begging the question' - Why all the fuss?
- Random thoughts on different to
WhomWatch
- 4. On Messrs Gwynne and Lowth
- 3. Silly infographics
- 2. Sometimes the comments are the best part
- 1. The Apostrophe Protection Society
General discussions
- Google search results - treat with a large dose of salt
- Random thoughts on the expression vanishingly unlikely
- Random lesson - non-assertive words plus a purposeful and
- Silly passives that have been seen (by me)
- Subjunctive were revisited (again)
- The which-hunting season is on us again (which / that)
- Prepositional verbs revisited
- Some random August ramblings
- When is a phrasal verb not a phrasal verb?
- The dramatic use of narrative tenses
- You've got another think coming
- Why I think Snow Patrol got it spot on
- Nowadays awesome is not quite so awesome as it used to beg
- It's a boy - transatlantic pronoun problems
- a (or an) historic occasion - and introducing Ngram
- a schadenfreudian slip
- The (theoretical) differences between will and shall
- Prescriptivists and pronouns
- Prescriptivists and change in language
- Random thoughts about the subjunctive
- Random thoughts about UK and US grammar
- Do u h8 txt msging lingo or do u thnk it's gr8
