S-v-o Sentence Pattern Examples

  As mentioned earlier, our example sentence has used a regular verb 'to play'. With the regular verbs we simply add '-ed'. This spelling pattern changes for words that end with a consonant and a Y: 'cry' goes to 'cried', 'try' to 'tried'. Another spelling pattern we have to be aware of is our consonant plus vowel plus consonant. In these instances, we double the consonant used: 'shop' needs the double P; 'ship' needs the double P. With these spelling patterns, and most spelling patterns in general for the English language, there are always exceptions to the rules. So we have to be aware of those exceptions. We also have to impart those exceptions on to our students. We can do so through various exercises and various activities to end our class. To form the negative sentence here,...  [Read more]

  Our second example sentence 'I am playing football at the moment.' is the present continuous tense. This has a different structure as the subject 'I', the verb 'to be' in the present tense 'am', 'is' or 'are' plus the verb with an '?ing' on the end. So here: 'I am playing football at the moment.' Whereas the present simple tense is used to talk about habits routines and facts, the present continuous tense is used to talk about actions in progress at the time of speaking or around the time of speaking. Our third example sentence is the present perfect: 'I have played football twice this week.' Here, the structure is the subject 'I', auxiliary verb 'have' or 'has' plus the past participle. The past participle is usually formed just by adding '-ed'- on to the end of the base form of...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Xiazhuang Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Weihai Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Native English speakers learn sentence structure through repetition before they learn the parts of speech and rules of grammar; this leads me to believe that a teaching approach that fosters an understanding of patterns in sentences would be valuable in the instruction of second language students of English in particular. Students will naturally recognize patterns...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Tianliu Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Weifang Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Learning grammar teaches one of the basic rules of constructing sentences. If people do not have the understanding of grammar, all they really know are words and some phrases and maybe some general basic questions. Those understandings are not enough to express thoughts and ideas effectively to other English speakers. While this could be sufficient for a tourist, it...  [Read more]

Linda Dunsmore Teaching Ideas One of the great things about teaching conditionals is that once you discover some classroom activities that work well for one, they can be adapted to suit any of the conditional patterns that you may be asked to teach. Here are 7 fun activities for teaching conditionals for the ESL classroom that you can easily adapt to help your students understand the correct structures and usages. Tell your students to stand up and form in two lines (teams) and have an item that can be thrown and caught without causing injury or damage. Set the timer on your phone to sound after about 30-45 seconds. The teacher calls out the beginning half of a conditional sentence, throws the ball to a student at the beginning of the line and asks them to complete it. The student then...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Yuze Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Changzhi Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Creative writing allows English Language Learning (ELL) students to express themselves in the classroom while gaining invaluable English experience. Students who balk at the idea of filling in worksheets or others who avoid speaking during class time may feel more comfortable expressing their English abilities through the controlled writing environment. Furthermore,...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Zuan Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Xi'an Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Learning a second language can be difficult, and this is especially true when the learners L1 and their target language are completely different in structure, sound, and tones. An English as a second language student who speaks French, German, or any other European language will have an easier task than one who speaks a language that is not of European origins. One such...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Nanqiao Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Linyi Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. What are some of the problems that Japanese encounter when learning English? Japanese learners encounter many problems when studying the English language. Some of these problems are a result of writing styles, pronunciation, sentence structures and the difference in the overall grammar in the English language and the Japanese language. Writing style for Japanese is...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in BingtuannongliushixinhuNongchang? Are you interested in teaching English in Changji Huizu Zizhizhou? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. There are four different present tenses; simple present, present continuous, present perfect and present perfect continuous. Simple present is merely a subject (e.g. I, you, she, the cat) with the base form of a verb (which can also have an s/es added to the base form), and then an auxiliary verb ‘to be’ and a ‘not’ can be...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Tiexi Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Bazhong Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. By Sullivan Rhoads Imagine trying to build a house with wood, but you have no nails, screws, or glue. How would it stay together? It wouldn't, it would fall to pieces. That's what it would be like to speak a language without learning grammar. Your sentences would just be jumbled piles of words. As human beings, we can put sentences together- we can all do grammar....  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Dingwu Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Dezhou Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Sometimes problems may be encountered when teaching students from different nationalities due to varied reasons. When teaching English to students that are culturally and linguistically different from ones own, the teacher must take great care to prepare and identify the specific problems one may encounter as well as be attentive to the problems that occur in real...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Huilong Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Nanchong Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. As it has been some time since I have practiced the structure of the English sentence I found this unit to be extremely helpful in the breakdown of placement and characteristics of words. The approach to the layout of the unit of focusing on each topic; i.e.: Noun, Verb, Adjective ... and then dissecting them further into specific types and the features or...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas While teaching a new language, we, as a teacher need to concentrate on some very important skills. such as writing, reading, speaking and listening. If we miss one of these skills, it will mean that we don't provide the needed knowledge for our students., and all these are equally important. Today I am going to speak about English grammar and my main point will be the modal auxiliary verbs and how to teach them as a grammar rule. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Edgar V. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. These verbs are used to show willingness, capability, necessity or possibility. And like other verbs, the modal verbs also show if the action happened in the past,...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Xindian Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Neijiang Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. This Unit 2 is about ''PARTS OF SPEECH''. It's a grammar lesson rreferring to the different words used to structure sentences in English. I have learnt that these parts have their sub categorisas follow: NOUNS(countable, uncountable, propre, common, plural or singular). Then, we have studied VERS(transitive, intransitive, base form, past participle, present...  [Read more]

  Whereas stress is typically concerned with one individual word, intonation is generally concerned with the variation in volume and pitch throughout an entire sentence. Intonation carries the message of a sentence. It's particularly important when questioning or agreeing, disagreeing and confirming statements. It's also very important when expressing emotions and feelings. The normal pattern for intonation is the rise-fall. Few examples would be ?I haven't seen him for a week,? or a simple word as ?okay?. With the falling intonation, we?re indicating that we're finished speaking. Again, ?I haven't seen him for a week? and ?okay?. A few more examples would be ?I'll see you at six then,? or a question of information ?How do you spell rough?? These are straightforward statements that...  [Read more]

Linda Dunsmore Teaching Ideas Passive voice is something native English speakers can use without much thought but it can be difficult for language learners to master because the switch from active to passive voice is quite an involved process – as many EFL teachers find when they first attempt to present it. Here are some fun activities that you can use in the classroom to help your students practice using this tricky language pattern. Do remember when you adapt these games that not every verb or tense in the English language can be used for the passive voice! This is a tried and tested game that’s been used with the passive voice for a long time. It’s a lot of fun and easily adaptable to past and present tenses, although you may need to be creative if you want to use any future...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Changjia Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Zibo Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Many teachers pay little attention to pronunciation. A good and experienced teacher will not leave out the importance of pronunciation. In my school years one of my foreign language teachers gave me an assignment to translate a newspaper article using a dictionary. The teacher gave me a good grade for my homework. The following translation exercises helped me a lot in...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Sometimes problems may be encountered when teaching students from different nationalities due to varied reasons. When teaching English to students that are culturally and linguistically different from one's own, the teacher must take great care to prepare and identify the specific problems one may encounter as well as be attentive to the problems that occur in real-time. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Roman S. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The problems an ESL or TEFL teacher may encounter can vary widely but are usually identified in these areas: pronunciation, grammar, and syntax as it pertains to language but also cultural issues may arise as well as...  [Read more]

  It also helps us form our tenses. Many of the tenses will use these auxiliary verbs; particularly we have our continuous tense and our perfect tense. There are additional tenses that use auxiliary verbs. We'll get into that when we talk about our individual tenses. Another important aspect of our verbs is that they generally tell us what tense the sentence has been formed in. Take for instance the verb "to live." We could use it as live, lives, living or lived. "I live" or "she lives in Bangkok," meaning the present. "I am living in Bangkok," still the present or "I lived in Bangkok," meaning the past. Another difference with our verbs has to do with whether or not the verb is regular or irregular. With the regular verbs, in order to conjugate the verb into the past, we simply...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas In today’s world learning English is no longer a possibility, but an essential part of being a world citizen. However, we must face the fact- for some people- to learn English grammar is not so easy and fun, they hate grammar and even think it is the most boring part of learning a new language. On the other hand, others are extremely interested in learning grammar rules and practice it as much as they can. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Glaucia S. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. Whoever wants to become an effective language learner cannot run from grammar lessons; it is a crucial part of the learning process besides reading, writing, speaking, and hearing....  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Majie Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Qujing Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Past tenses have similar word structures to present tenses. For example, ‘I have been playing soccer regularly’ is a present perfect continuous sentence and ‘I had been playing soccer regularly’ is a past perfect continuous sentence. The first sentence is relevant to the present tense (what is happening now) and the second sentence refers solely to the past....  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Longting Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Weinan Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Grammar is more than just throwing a bunch of words together and hoping they make sense, instead it helps us construct and understand what we are writing or reading. Allow me to briefly explain the basic and fundamental principles of grammar and how essential being able to speak and write are. We'll start it off by talking about common nouns and pronouns. Common...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Learning a second language can be difficult, and this is especially true when the learners L1 and their target language are completely different in structure, sound, and tones. An English as a second language student who speaks French, German, or any other European language will have an easier task than one who speaks a language that is not of European origins. One such language is Mandarin Chinese. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Ashley L. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The areas that native Mandarin speakers most often run into difficulty are pronunciation, tones, tenses, and sentence structure. A Chinese speaker might well know the English alphabet, as...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Flashcards are a proven way to learn new information. Their use however, does not need to be monotonous or boring. Make your own, play a game, show the card, and combine it with art, put them in sequence, or create and fill-in sentences. These ideas will stimulate both sides of the brain by combining thinking and doing. This will also keep the students attentive. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Corby K. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. The students will get twice as much exposure to the words if they create the flashcards themselves. They learn while creating and also later when using them. One way to use this idea would be teaching young learners color and food...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Zhegou Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Jining Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. The first language (L1) is the mother tongue of a person, which is naturally acquired since birth; while the second language (L2) is a language an individual learns in order to communicate with a community that speaks the target language. L1 and L2 acquisition present certain similarities, which have valuable implications on the L2 learning and teaching process. In...  [Read more]

Federico Riva TEFL Information Alumni Experiences Placement tests are designed to put students in their appropriate ESL level band. What are the levels and how do the tests do this? ### Watch the video about this topic One type of test we commonly use for our ESL students is called the placement test. They're also called level tests and as the name implies what we're trying to do is to place students in a particular level of class. Typically there are five levels, these being, Starter (Level 1), Elementary, Pre-Intermediate, Intermediate and Upper- Intermediate (Level 5) Some of the more common features of these tests are that; 1. All four skills are commonly tested that means, reading, writing, speaking and listening and 2. They tend to be what's called progressive. By progressive what...  [Read more]

Federico Riva TEFL Information Teaching Ideas What are ice breakers and when and where do we use them? In this blog post, we will cover these issues and give actual examples of activities you can use with your classes. Icebreakers are games or activities that are designed to ‘break the ice’. Typically you would use these kinds of games or activities at the beginning of a new school year, when you have a new set of students, or a new class that you don't know and they don't know you. You also can use icebreakers to get your students going at the start of the lesson speaking in English and that's really important as you don't want to come into the classroom and say, “Open your books to page five” and then start studying. Often your classroom may be the only place where they are...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Fancun Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Yuncheng Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn, and perhaps vice versa. Though many Japanese programs do not require English teachers to learn Japanese, teachers should study basic Japanese to understand challenges students will encounter when learning English. English and Japanese share almost nothing in common; they have different...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Gongquan Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Yibin Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Unit two defined the parts of speech. These are the building blocks of all sentences within the English language. I feel this section is perhaps the most important section, as it breaks down each component of the sentence structure, and allows one to properly assemble sentences and phrases. Understanding of each component of the sentence, will allow you to also...  [Read more]

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Gongle Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Yibin Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. I learnt how to construct a basic/simple sentence using a specified structure. this section further helped me to identify parts of speech and specify them. For example, there are different types of nouns and adjectives. In learning the structure of a sentence, the unit explicitly explained where different forms of words are placed within a sentence. I learnt how to...  [Read more]