Archive for the ‘Spelling’ Category

As promised, here are the good ones to make up for the crappy ones in Part Two below. Btw, if something sounds almost what you are looking for but not quite, a good tip I’ve worked out over far too many hours on the internet is to click on the link anyway then to delete just the last part of the URL in your web browser (for example leaving http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/telephoning where once there was http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/telephoning/phone-phrasals/), and see what the rest of that section has to offer.

Plot summaries add the relative clauses (this is the kind of thing I should do more of- ignoring copyright law to add some skills work to my grammar games)

Superstitions going to predictions (with a surprising amount of reading- for me- in this one too. Also with lots of cultural bits, which is much more like my usual kind of thing)

Six word murder mystery challenge (with no language focus of any kind whatsoever- don’t know what was coming over me that month!)

Telephoning getting through or not (back to my “classics”- as functional language is at least as unteachable as grammar, just throw a whole lot at them in the hope that a different one will be new and memorable for each student or heard by them and so reinforced soon)

Present Perfect sentence completion guessing game (another of the most adaptable games in TEFL, the subject of my book that never was- long story!)

Superlatives numbers trivia (two more things you can never go wrong with- numbers practice and trivia- this time tied in with superlatives)

Possessive S Simon says (very fun TPR game for young learners, though you are welcome to try it with your Market Leader Pre-Intermediate group if you like)

Possessive S pictionary (ditto)

This that these those pictionary (and again, although this one I have used a variation on with Elem adults to good effect)

Spelling code game (ditto- meaning ditto the last one, not ditto the ones it was dittoing)

Idioms of success and failure (an easy intro, but still more one for Market Leader than young learners, although again…)

List of phrasal verbs using for telephoning (not ready for class, but took me a while to put together so might save you that while some time)

Technology find things in common (also more of a list than a worksheet, but just enough effor put in to make it the latter)

Chrimbo and NuYear worksheets coming up in December. Just the same ones as last year, but will try to arrange them more conveniently.

More bits and pieces that I didn’t know, had never thought about or had doubts about from The Cambridge Grammar of English:

- The reason why you don’t double the p in “developing” is because the previous vowel isn’t stressed. Ditto for “delivered” and “opener”, but lots of words ending in -l in BrE and others such as handicapped and programmed don’t follow the rule
 
- Doubling consonants when adding -ed and -ing is part of a more general rule when “a suffix beginning with a vowel is added”, e.g. -ish, -ence and –er

- The “i before e except after c” rule only counts for the /i:/ pronunciation like “brief”, so most of the “exceptions” are because other pronunciations are spelt “ei”, e.g. neighbour, weigh, reign, leisure. Real exceptions include financier, species and examples of -cy changing to -cies, e.g. democracies.
 
- The final e making the preceding stressed vowel long, e.g. hat/hate, also works for -le, hence able, fable, bible etc.
 
- The plural of bus can be buses or busses. Ditto with biased/biassed, focusing/focussing, gases/gasses.

“Is “becuase”, with its 4,950,000 hits on a famous web search engine, the commonest typo in the English language? (more…)