Tom Garside
Present participles and past participles - what’s the difference?
When teaching grammar, a lot of focus tends to be put onto past participles. These forms of verbs appear in many structures such as present
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Tom Garside
- May 7
- 2 min
What is a gerund?
In English, -ing is one of the most common verb endings. There are several different reasons why verbs might end in -ing, and this can be a
Tom Garside
- Apr 30
- 3 min
Modal auxiliaries and auxiliary verbs… What’s the difference?
Auxiliaries are a major part of English grammar constructions. They appear in tenses, questions, negative forms and other functional
Tom Garside
- Apr 23
- 3 min
Time and tense - what’s the difference?
When we talk about English grammar in general terms, it is common to hear people talking about ‘the past tense’. However, when we are
Tom Garside
- Apr 16
- 3 min
Possessive pronouns and possessive adjectives - what’s the difference?
At school, I remember being taught about possessive pronouns showing ownership of a thing, for example ‘that’s my bag’ or ‘it’s his car’.
Tom Garside
- Apr 8
- 3 min
Past simple and Past participle verbs - What’s the difference?
When we work with tenses and verb forms, students can easily get confused between the different uses of verbs ending with -ed. The -ed
Tom Garside
- Apr 2
- 2 min
Verb phrases and phrasal verbs - what’s the difference?
The verb system in English (as in many languages) is quite complex, and one point which is often misunderstood surrounds phrasal verbs (or
Tom Garside
- Mar 15
- 4 min
He said, she said… How to teach reported speech effectively
The structure and meaning of reported speech in English is notoriously difficult to teach. Teacher training courses such as the Trinity Cert
Tom Garside
- Mar 6
- 3 min
Pronunciation, Phonology, Phonics? What’s the difference?
Pronunciation is a fundamental part of speaking for second-language learners of English. A learner can have accurate spoken grammar, a wide
Tom Garside
- Feb 28
- 7 min
One teaching question, 3 Chat GPT responses
With the buzz around ‘scary good’ ChatGPT and its benefits for teachers and students, I thought I’d give it a quick test and see what it
Tom Garside
- Feb 16
- 4 min
TESOL Teaching mistakes to Avoid 7: Explaining language aids understanding
Ask many English language teachers what they find challenging about the job, and they will tell you that a lot of English grammar and vocab
Tom Garside
- Feb 8
- 4 min
TESOL Teaching mistakes to Avoid 6: ‘Correct’ answers are enough
In most school subjects, performance can be assessed by how much information has been retained by a student, as demonstrated in a test
Tom Garside
- Feb 5
- 5 min
TESOL Teaching mistakes to Avoid 5: ‘Now listen to the recording’ is a listening task
There are many reasons for using audio recordings and reading texts in the language classroom. Listening and reading are major language
Tom Garside
- Jan 30
- 3 min
TESOL Teaching mistakes to Avoid 4: The more you teach, the more students learn
In this series of articles, we are looking at some common teaching actions which more often than not simply don’t work. If you find yourself
Tom Garside
- Jan 23
- 3 min
TESOL teaching mistakes to avoid 3: Drilling to teach meaning
In this series of articles, we are looking at some common teaching actions which more often than not simply don’t work. If you find yourself
Tom Garside
- Jan 15
- 4 min
TESOL teaching mistakes to avoid 2: Asking students to read texts out loud.
In this series of articles, we are looking at some common teaching actions which more often than not simply don’t work. If you find yourself
Tom Garside
- Jan 13
- 5 min
TESOL teaching mistakes to avoid 1: Asking 'what does this word mean?'
In this series of articles, we look at some common teaching actions which more often than not simply don’t work. If you find yourself doing
Tom Garside
- Jan 12
- 3 min
Trinity CertPT graduate Julie Chen interview
We're proud of all our graduates, each one is a success story of their own. We know how hard you all worked, so we were delighted when our
Tom Garside
- Dec 21, 2022
- 1 min
Another year of global connections - countries we have connected in 2022
In the 18 months since we last looked back at the trainers, teachers, trainees and students that we worked with in 2021, from 60 countries
Tom Garside
- Dec 13, 2022
- 3 min
Word by word: An adaptable activity to teach word order and sentence grammar
So much of a teacher’s time is spent either correcting errors or working on the smallest parts of English grammar: prepositions, articles
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