This week, the Pre-Intermediate classes were filled with more useful grammar points, functions and vocabulary to help everyone improve their English.
Firstly, our topic for Monday and Tuesday was ‘Places to Stay’. This meant we learnt lots of new vocabulary relating to accommodation, but in particular, hotel problems. This led us to our first grammar point of the week, second conditionals. Think about this… “What would you do if there were cockroaches in your hotel room?”
We also explored how to talk about past habits by using the grammar function ‘used to’. For example, “I never used to like camping, but now I go quite regularly”. What is something you used to do regularly but don’t do now?
On Wednesday and Thursday our topic shifted to ‘telephone’ language. We did some listening practice writing messages from telephone conversations and learnt a few useful expressions to use on the telephone. For example, “Bob’s out with a client.”
Next, we learnt about the different ways we can use ‘just / already / yet / still’. “Have you arrived in Australia yet? Are you still in your country?”
After reading some interesting short news stories about ‘phones and emergencies’, our final grammar point of the week was again extending on reported speech. How can we report this conversation…? => “I’ve just arrived in Australia. I arrived yesterday.” said Bob.
Answer: Bob said that he had just arrived in Australia and he had arrived the day before.
Oh… did I also mention we learnt some useful language (although / despite) for writing postcards, too…?