English Grammar Lessons

English grammar lessons can be boring. After going through endless rules, and filling in gap fill exercises, one can begin to lose one's joy! But it doesn't have to be that way. I've got some tips for you that will help make the lessons more interesting for the students, and I've prepared some free downloadable grammar lessons for you to print off and use.

Teaching Tips

Start off by trying to elicit the grammar point from the students. If they don't know it, give them some examples of it in use to help them along.
Always give the students the opportunity to discuss what they want to talk about when using and presenting grammar, rather than providing pre-set sentences/topics. People are generally not that interested in John's cat, or Mary's pink house, but they are interested in their own lives. What do I mean? I was presenting the Passive Voice to a student who was a computer programmer. Instead of providing predetermined examples, I asked him for his suggestions on what he wanted to discuss, and he provided the sentence 'I test the software every 2 weeks'. We took that sentence and changed it together into the various Passive Voice tenses (eg The software is tested every 2 weeks, the software has been tested every 2 weeks etc). He found this much more interesting and useful, than for example, Mary is cleaning her room.
If you need some random subjects to use during the practice, get the students to write down their choice of words on flashcards and use those.
It's important to go through each grammar point thoroughly. Don't rush to the next grammar point before making sure the students understand the one you are covering. It's better to understand one grammar point well, than to understand 5 grammar points not at all.
While the students are talking, write down a few of their grammar mistakes, and go through them once the conversation has finished This way you can target the specific mistakes that they are making.

A Note about my Grammar Lessons

My English grammar lessons use the principle of eliciting the grammar from the students and on doing free practice. These lessons are therefore appropriate for students that are at intermediate level or above They are not suitable for beginners. I have not included any gap-fill exercises for 2 reasons. Firstly, there is a huge surplus of these activities already available in course books and online, and secondly, these types of activities are not very interesting for more advanced levels.

I hope you find my English grammar lessons useful and fun J