‘Why is this room so messy?’ asked Mum as she glared at Matthew. His room looked like a hurricane had swept through it. ‘I told you to make sure it was clean before I came back, didn’t I?’ ‘I cleaned it, but-’ Matthew explained. ‘You call this a clean room?’ ‘I cleaned it, I did!’ Matthew’s eyes watered. ‘First you disobey me, and now you… Read More
When writing a story, the majority of students are able to come up with creative plots and vivid characters. But when it comes to the actual writing, students can struggle with using the correct tenses. This takes some practice, especially when stories move around in time a lot. For example, a story set in the past might have a character who speaks in present tense,… Read More
As a native Cantonese speaker, I used to find subject-verb agreement confusing. There isn’t anything similar in Chinese, so I had to work hard to learn how to use this grammatical feature. It’s very important in English and has a few strange rules, but it’s actually much simpler than it used to be. In the past, there were more verb endings than we have now. Read More
From my experience of teaching Advanced Grammar and Reading, students are often confused by the use of simple past tense and present perfect tense. This table shows you the differences between the two tenses: Simple Past Tense Present Perfect Tense Form +ve: past tense form of verb +ve: has / have + past participle -ve: did not + base form of verb -ve: has… Read More
