Reading skills are difficult to develop and students’ problems vary. Here is a list of factors that create some problems for many students and a few aspects to consider in order to tackle them:
Paraphrase
Many students are accustomed to providing in their response the information required using the same words as in the questions. This is a problem that they...
Without any doubt, the use of phrasal verbs when speaking can turn out to be a challenge for our Spanish-speaking students. These idiomatic collocations, which native talkers use so naturally in their discourse, are difficult for foreign learners to acquire and, therefore, to deal with. It’s worth then summarizing the reasons why our students find them so difficult and...
One of the main concerns and deep-rooted wishes we, as teachers, hang onto is for students to start talking as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the barrier most students encounter is their insecurity to communicate in the new language and their fear of losing face before their classmates. Students do not want to sound awkward or silly, so they wait...
What English teacher hasn’t had problems presenting the combination of one verb following another, particularly to speakers of Spanish? You have to tell your students that some verbs are necessarily followed by an infinitive while others are ineludibly tailed by a gerund. The trouble is if you have analytical learners within your pupils who ask what the criterion is...
Don’t you feel good when your students use idioms and collocations in class? Isn’t it worth to see them making such an effort to find the most accurate expression they are capable of? The big question is: How can students learn them? The answer is easy: by reading and listening to the most language resources they can. Once students...
In this new series of articles, we’d like to address some of the problems our students find in the process of learning English. Let us start with one apparently simple, but tricky point. In my experience, students have some problems when choosing some of the famous linking words, particularly those with similar meanings but different grammar.
What happens, for example,...
