Grammar for People Who Never Studied Grammar

Plenty of excellent English teachers were never taught grammar at school. You speak the language perfectly; what you have never had to do is explain why. That is a learnable skill, and it is smaller than it looks — a handful of points cause most of the questions you will get in your first year.

You do not need every rule. You need a clear explanation and a check.

Students rarely want a linguistic lecture. They want a short rule, an example they can copy, and a way to tell two similar things apart. Teach in context first, with a sentence or a situation, then show the pattern, then let them use it. Naming the tense matters far less than showing when it is used.

Present perfect versus past simple

This trips up more new teachers than anything else. The past simple is for a finished action at a finished time: I visited Cape Town in 2019. The present perfect connects the past to now without saying when: I have visited Cape Town. The moment you add a finished time expression you need the past simple, which is why I have visited Cape Town last year is wrong.

A quick test to give students: if the sentence answers when?, use past simple. If it answers ever, in your life, up to now?, use present perfect.

And the famous pair: she has been to Johannesburg means she went and has come back. She has gone to Johannesburg means she is there now, or on her way. Been is the return trip; gone is one-way.

Countable and uncountable

English treats some things as items you can count and others as a mass. You can have three chairs but not three furnitures. The difficulty is that the categories are conventional rather than logical, and a student’s first language may divide them somewhere else entirely.

• Uncountables that catch people out: information, advice, furniture, luggage, money, news, homework, bread, research, equipment.
• Countable words take many, a few and a plural: many suitcases. Uncountables take much, a little and no plural: much luggage.
• To count an uncountable, use a unit: a piece of advice, two items of luggage, a slice of bread.
• Some words are both, with different meanings. A coffee is a cup of it; coffee is the substance.

Articles: a, an and the

Articles are tiny, and they are the last thing many learners master — especially speakers of languages that have none. The workable version: use a or an the first time you mention a singular countable thing, and the once both of you know which one you mean.

I bought a dress. The dress was blue. Use the as well when there is only one of something in the situation: close the door, the sun. Use no article at all for general statements with plurals or uncountables: dogs are loyal, water is wet. That will carry a student a very long way before the exceptions start to matter.

Phrasal verbs

A phrasal verb is a verb plus a small word that changes the meaning: look up, give up, put off. Students find them hard because the meaning is often nothing like the parts. Two pieces of advice. First, teach them in context and in chunks, as vocabulary, rather than as a list to memorise — I gave up sugar is worth more than a table of forty. Second, many of them can be split by an object: turn the light off or turn off the light, but with a pronoun only turn it off is possible. Drill that pattern with pronouns and it will start to sound natural.

A few other reliable troublemakers

• Will and going to: going to for a plan you already had, will for a decision made in the moment or an offer.
• Since and for: since takes a point in time, for takes a length of time.
• Make and do: largely collocation, so teach the pairs as fixed phrases instead of hunting for a rule.
• Boring and bored, interesting and interested: the trap is describing yourself with the wrong one. I am boring is a confession rather than a complaint.
• Word order with adverbs of frequency: I always drink coffee, but I am always late.

When a student asks something you cannot answer

This happens to every teacher at every level of experience, and it is not a crisis. What you must never do is invent a rule. Students remember confident nonsense forever, and it is very hard to undo.

Say something like: that is a very good question — I want to give you the exact answer, so let me check it and we will start with it next lesson. Write it down where they can see you writing it down. Then actually check it in a reliable reference, and actually bring it back. Students respect that enormously, and it models exactly the learning behaviour you want from them.

Build two habits while you are still studying. Keep a learner’s dictionary and a teacher’s grammar reference within reach, and read the language notes in the course book before you teach the unit rather than five minutes before the class. Most of the questions you will be asked are already answered there.