Friday, July 31, 2026
Teaching consists of countless abilities and knowhow, all ready to be used at a moment’s notice when a student’s hand goes up to ask a question and you have to give a satisfactory answer. And one of those main aspects to respond to is knowledge of grammar. Yes, this may dredge up memories’ past of being monotonously lectured to or working your way through endless controlled grammar exercises, and while these approaches have changed somewhat, regardless, where would you be without them? Or more to the point, how accurate and fluent would your communication be? Grammar is often seen as the glue that holds a language together, the scaffolding upon which meaning can be hung with all the lovely words in existence. And while it may not be the be-all and end-all of English classes, it is of vital importance to be able to understand and explain the key concepts that you are teaching, and to do so in a manner that everyone can benefit from. In other words, to be an effective teacher. So, without further ado here are 7 aspects of grammar that you should know if you want to be said English teacher.
To begin with, all those terms found throughout coursebooks and that some teachers eagerly use with abandon from countable nouns and adverbs to your past perfects, subjects and clauses, all obviously mean something. Yet, there is difference between simply knowing it and actually being able to explain it. And that dear reader, is the magic of being a teacher. It is important to note however, that while metalanguage is crucial to know as a teacher, it is obviously level dependent, so you won’t be giving an in-depth explanation of Participle Clauses to Young Learners!
Related to the above point, nouns are a very common term that could easily take up a whole book. For starters, noun is really an umbrella term and within it there are numerous types such as abstract vs. concrete, proper vs. common, not to mention countable (can they be counted?) vs. uncountable (I’ll leave it to you to figure out). And one of the challenges here is that sometimes concepts can differ between languages like advice being uncountable in English but countable in Spanish: *advices. Moreover, in English there are irregular countable nouns like one person but twenty people, not *twenty peoples so knowing which nouns take irregular plural forms is also vitally important.
Adjectives have the honour of being used to describe things and typically come before a noun or after the verb to be as in This new video game is exciting. But of course, like many things, it is not as simple as that. There are numerous suffixes (letters added to the end of a word to make a new word) that denote an adjective and these contain meaning as to how the adjective is being used. For example, colourful refers to having lots of different colours – being “full” of colour in other words. Two more common suffixes are _ing and _ed, and it is imperative that students know their difference in use though fortunately it is relatively easy to understand. _ed is used to describe how someone feels, say disappointed whereas _ing is used to describe the thing causing that feeling: a disappointing game. It always produces a laugh whenever a student mixes the endings up and loudly exclaims, I’m so boring when they clearly meant to say I’m so bored! (But a golden teaching opportunity!).
Continuing with the English jargon theme, it’s worth mentioning the special connection that adverbs and adjectives have, that is, the collocations they frequently make. What is meant by this is that many adjectives go with specific adverbs to add another layer of meaning. For instance, you can say highly likely or completely different but they are not interchangeable so *highly different or *completely likely doesn’t work. Collocations like these really enrich learners’ language and make them sound much more natural, which is why imparting this is vitally important.
Have you ever heard the classic English teaching joke “The past, present and future walked into a bar. It was tense.”? The thing is, what’s really quite funny about it is that English doesn’t actually have a future tense! This may come as a shock to you but the linguistic definition of tense involves the inflection of the verb, so of course the present and past can be made clear by adding an ‘s’ or ed to indicate what time is being referred to. However, in the case of the future, this requires the use of supporting verbs like will, going to or the use of language like bound to, ergo there is no future tense in English. Mind blown!
Another interesting quirk to be aware of is that tense doesn’t necessarily correspond with time. Consider the verbs in the following phrases I leave on the first train tomorrow morning and If you ate that you would be sick and think about when they are referring to. Hopefully you agree with me and deem the first to be using present simple to talk about the future and the latter using the past simple to mean now. This shows that it is essential to be aware of how the verbs are used rather than taking their grammatical names at face value.
Here are a couple of grammar equivalents, that is, they mean the same thing but with different words (in some contexts). Take for instance, the sentence I used to get up early in summer and go swimming at dawn and switch out the used to for would. Is there a difference in meaning? No, not really is the answer. Both illustrate an action that was repeatedly done in the past but isn’t anymore. Now try it with I used to be rich. Here, as you might have noticed it doesn’t work and that is because the verb to be is what’s called a state verb, one which describes a state of being or perception rather than an action. The grammar rule here is that would cannot be used with state verbs in the context of discussing repeated past actions whereas used to works in both contexts. Students obviously need to be aware of this crucial difference.
Long story short, grammar knowledge is key to being an effective English teacher. Whether this blog is your source of that (thanks in advance!) or you dive deeper via books, professional development, whatever, any improvement in understanding grammar will put you in good stead for the future. And by the way, there’s a lot more where this came from so stay tuned for next month’s continuation of useful grammar you should know, for what is a blogpost without a sequel?!
