Hello! At this point, there’re no recommended flow of lessons or ready-to-use courses for a given level. We’re thinking about creating such courses, but for now you must decide yourself what your student’s needs are and select the lesson order yourself.
Remembering irregular verb forms, and using them, is not an easy task. While memorizing long columns of verbs might be useful, many students don’t like the idea of learning things by heart. Some even loathe it. And those who decide to take up the challenge will still need to practise the verbs in the classroom. And then practise some more. Here are some ways of working with irregular verbs that will help your students remember them once and for all.
This activity is much more fun than simply eliciting irregular verb forms. Use it instead of asking ‘What’s the Past Simple form of run?’-type of questions, as it will introduce extra challenge and excitement. It will also make your students think in English.
Ask students to come up with words or phrases that fit each of the situations. They should write them down in random order. When they are ready, make sure they can’t see the situations any more (cover the list or stop sharing the screen). Then, in pairs or groups, ask students to guess which answer belongs to which situation by recalling what the situations were. The guessing part will go like this:
To help your students practise Past Simple forms more freely, ask them to tell stories. Tasks based around stories can vary in length and challenge, so it is probably best to start with easier, more controlled activities.
One of the ESL Brains lessons that deals with irregular verbs is the pre-intermediate lesson Kindness means everything. Your students will create a story based on an animated video. The lesson, however, mostly offers controlled practice of Past Simple. So after using it with your students, provide them with more free speaking practice, which you can do in two ways:
Use other animated videos (like this one or this one) and ask students to tell the stories using their own words. Play the videos in parts and ask students to tell each other the parts in pairs. They can then repeat the whole story after they’ve watched the entire video. You can provide students with some irregular verbs or leave the choice of verbs up to them if you think they are ready for it.
Come up with words or pictures of characters or objects and ask students to tell a story using them. The funnier the words, the better. See what story your students come up with using the following words: eyebrow, Christmas tree, cloud, disgusting, uncomfortable chair, architecture student. If they struggle with ideas, give them some prompts, e.g. ‘Why was the uncomfortable chair a problem?’, ‘Whose Christmas tree was it?’ They will get better at it with the second and the third stories.
Stories can obviously be used to practise Past Participle with your more advanced students through Past Perfect. Discover some great speaking ideas using irregular verb forms in these B1/B2 lessons: Be a better storyteller and Narrative tenses – using Past Simple/Continuous/Perfect for storytelling.
A fun task to practise both Past Simple and Past Participle forms of irregular verbs is asking your students to find experiences they have in common (in pairs or groups).
Give your students a list of irregular verbs such as the following: break, drive, teach, wear and write. Their task is to talk and ask each other about their experiences. They might ask ‘Have you ever broken a leg?’, and as the conversation continues they might realize they don’t have a broken limb in common but they have broken crockery on more than one occasion. At this point, they will be ready to tell you: ‘We have broken some plates.’ You can do the task first with a student in front of the class to show everyone how it works.
The task can be a great follow-up to the A2/B1 lesson You’re never too old for great things, but can be done successfully with upper-intermediate students, too. Just use some of the less obvious verbs, like quit, seek, sew or set, and make sure to tell students you want to get the feedback in Present Perfect. For example ‘We set an alarm clock every night.’ won’t work, but ‘We’ve set an alarm clock more than once this week.’ will. While talking, they will need to use both Past Simple and Past Participle forms of the verbs, as well as questions and negatives.
The more you let your students speak, the sooner they will remember the irregular verb forms, as these are used in the simplest of conversations. Remember to recycle the forms from time to time, for instance by doing one of the activities described in this article when you have some extra time left at the end of the lesson. Let us know how it goes and share your ideas for practising irregular verbs below!
‘Grammar is fun!’ is not something that English teachers often hear from their students. ‘To know English, you need to know the grammar’, many of us have probably responded on numerous occasions, hoping to encourage learners to do more review tasks, usually to no avail. Grammar has been considered the aim of language learning for too long. Let’s call it what it actually is: a communication tool. And tools are fun as they make our lives easier. But instead of explaining it to students, why not show them?
What students dislike about learning grammar is often the amount of controlled written practice they have to do once a new structure is introduced. As much as one or two activities of this kind help students get acquainted with the structure, there is no need to dedicate too much time to them. Language is supposed to be used freely, and what students usually expect from the teacher is to have the opportunity to do so. If you help your students see that knowing how to use grammar actually makes communication a lot easier, they are much more likely to enjoy the practice. They will also become more confident and feel ready to use the structure outside the classroom.
If you want to teach grammar in a fun way, all you need to do is find the right context. As much as asking your students what they have done today is a good way to start practising Present Perfect with ‘yet’ and ‘already’, you could also tell them to guess what they think the other people in the group (or you) have already done or haven’t done yet. You could also introduce the idea of a bucket list and have students report their achievements and plans using the structure, ask them to tell you about their projects at work and explain what they have already started doing and what they haven’t had the chance to do yet, or encourage them to tell you about their holiday plans and explain what they have already done and what is still left to do as part of their preparation. Being able to get the message across in a foreign language is what makes learning grammar fun! And don’t worry if your students don’t always use the target language during practice – let them mix it freely with the structures they already know. This will only consolidate the new language and make it a part of their linguistic toolbox.
Instead of asking students if they remember how a structure is formed (or giving them more gap-filling activities, for that matter), allow them to play with the language a little more. They could write revision tasks for each other, or prepare questions for their partner using the target language. This will allow for a deeper level of language processing and simply help them remember more. Just don’t forget to add variety and not reuse the tasks from the practice stage. For instance, you might ask your students to discuss what they have in common using the structure. Again, think of a context where the target language is likely to be used. Take Second Conditional, for example. Students could discuss the possible circumstances under which they would quit their jobs or adopt five puppies. To make it more interesting, you might ask them to talk for as long as they need to in order to agree on two scenarios that would make both the students in a pair decide to take these steps.
What many students really enjoy are problem-solving tasks. They are engaging, amusing, and don’t usually require much preparation by the teacher. The good news is that you can teach grammar in a fun way using them. It is important to design problem-solving tasks in a way that makes students likely to use the target language (context, again!). So if your students need revision on expressing quantity, tell them that they are throwing a dinner party for ten people and that together they need to agree on the amount of food and drink they will buy. To work with modal verbs, ask your students to imagine that they are opening a language school and that they need to decide on five rules that teachers and students must follow. Tell your more advanced students who need to practise Third and Mixed Conditionals a bit more to come up with five major events in world history and decide how they could have gone differently under certain conditions, or how our world would be different now if they hadn’t happened.
Games are appealing to all students, so don’t hesitate to use them to teach grammar in a fun way to adults, not only kids and teens. Even the most dull activity can be turned into something fun, especially if you add a competitive element to it. If you feel that your students need some drilling, and don’t just want them to mindlessly repeat sentence after sentence, do it with a twist. Give one student a sentence in the target language. Let’s say you’re practising verb patterns and a student reads the following sentence: I expect her to be on time. Their partner has to ask three questions, repeating all the parts of the statement, and the first student has to respond with anything that comes to mind. The conversation could go like this:
ESL WorksheetsSome other examples could include: They suggested buying it., She threatened to take his watch., or He tried calling her. Students might collect points for each correct question, or the person who comes up with the highest number of queries could be the winner.
If your students are a bit creative (and they usually are!), give one of them a word and ask them to explain it to other students using the target language only. A spoon can be described using Second Conditional (If I didn’t have one at home, I wouldn’t be able to eat soup.), verb patterns (I once tried eating a sandwich with it, but it didn’t work.), Mixed Conditionals (If they hadn’t been invented, we would use forks to stir tea.) or Passive structures (It is usually made of metal and it is used in restaurants.) These can be quite challenging, so before doing the task in class you might try creating such sentences yourself, but remember that students are often more imaginative than we think.
On our website, you will find numerous lesson plans to teach grammar in a fun way. You can have a look at them here. We’d also like to hear about your ideas to make grammar fun! Comment below so that we all can learn from each other 🙂
Wow. Brilliant. Some great ideas there! Thanks. I occasionally use the virtual platform Gather (gather.town) with my kids and young adult online classes (works best with groups but 1-to-1’s okay too). The Escape Room on it is great for getting students to work together and use problem-solving language to try get out.
We have been publishing flipped lesson plans since 2019, and are really happy how popular they have become among our teacher community. We want to share with you what flipped classroom is, how it benefits students and how to use our worksheets to apply flipped classroom for teaching English in your classroom.
Flipped classroom is a blended learning-teaching model based on the principle that the classroom is where the active part of learning should take place. It’s ‘flipped’ (or ‘inverted’) because it requires students to do some preparation before the lesson so that the time spent with the teacher is used more effectively. Before the lesson, students have their first look at a new language or a video, and get ready for what is going to happen in the lesson. During the class, the focus is on getting semi-controlled and free practice, using the new language structures, and discussing the topic of the video. In other words, the lesson is about production rather than passive learning this way, the precious classroom time is used more actively.
Problem-solving tasks, debates, role-plays, discussions and brainstorming are often skipped by ESL teachers due to lack of time. The flipped classroom approach allows for these interactive activities to take place. The pre-class part of a flipped lesson might also focus on establishing the lesson context to make students prepared for what they will study in the classroom.
Introducing the flipped classroom approach allows students to take control of their learning process and become more autonomous. They are able to study at their own pace or watch a video as many times as necessary. They are also more motivated and more likely to engage in the lesson. Additionally, students are exposed to English outside the classroom, which helps create a habit of doing it more often.
