10 Activities to Improve Your English Grammar

[Self-Study Guide #5]
By Emile Alexander Dodds

For many learners, grammar is the hardest aspect of English. Others enjoy learning grammar as a way to better analyse English sentences. Whatever your feelings on grammar, you know it’s important. That’s why we’ve put together this guide with ten great ideas for grammar activities that you can do on your own!

Dodds supports his list of activities by stating that traditional books that list rules and give exercises for practice are not the best way to master grammar. He proposes that learning it in context is more effective.

The ten activities that he lists begin with easy ones which require only 15 minutes of practice, then medium for 30 minute sessions, and finally challenging ones that might take an hour to complete. He recommends starting by testing for the student’s CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) level, and another tool to discover what to study.

Easy activities

1. Quiz time – There are links for many online quizzes
2. Listening for phrasal verbs – Use a recommended podcast series with transcripts. The benefit of listening is to also learn pronunciation.

Medium-effort activities

3. Create a cloze: verb tenses – Copy a short story and delete the main verbs. Later, fill in the blanks with the correct verb tenses.
4. Emphatically so – Listen for strong adjectives in a podcast. Try to write new sentences using these words, and then go to a grammar checker for corrections.
5. Create a cloze: prepositions – Similar to the cloze for verb tenses, but leave a day between steps to avoid simply memorizing the answers.
6. Create a quiz: plurals – Copy and paste a text and change all of the singular nouns to plural.
7. Create a quiz: articles – Similar to the other cloze activities, remove the articles from a text and later put them back in. Check it with the original text.
8. Linking words – While listening to a podcast, write down linking words. Then write a summary of it using all of the linking words.

Hard or challenging activities

9. Looking to the future – Using a text about something that happened in the past, change it to the future.
10. If I were… – Find an interesting story about a person and then rewrite it as if the student were that person.

Dodds recommends mixing up the type of practice and using authentic materials when possible, which can help students learn and use grammar correctly.

You can find all of the links to grammatical explanations and resources here.

Love Them Or Hate Them,
You Need Phrasal Verbs

By Emile Alexander Dodds

Children getting along

Phrasal verbs are confusing, and there are so many of them. Sometimes, they don’t seem to make any sense. But can you ignore them? And, if not, what are some techniques to master them?

Following up on his article about grammar, Dodds offers advice for learning phrasal verbs. He first explains what they are and follows up with the reason they are so difficult to learn: the meaning is not related to the words by themselves and context often doesn’t give adequate clues, either. Added to that, while they usually contain common verbs, they often have multiple meanings, such as “take off”, and then, some can be separated with other words between them, and some cannot. For this, he provides a link to an explanation which distinguishes the two.

He emphasizes the importance of learning phrasal verbs, but rather than trying to memorize a list, he recommends focusing on the ones that are most commonly used. He suggests copying sentences that contain phrasal verbs, but avoid translating them. Instead, guess the meaning from the context or look them up. Then, after copying two or three sentences that contain them, the student should try to use them.

Dodds mentions that there are other terms for phrasal verbs, but not to be concerned about the terminology. Short stories or podcasts with transcriptions are recommended as good sources for these verbs. He concludes with a short starter list and links to a few other lists.

You can find the links and lists here.