What is a Clause?

We all know what a sentence is. But it’s useful to break a sentence down and talk about Clauses as well when you’re teaching English. These are, essentially, the building blocks of sentences and each sentence contains one or more clauses. a sentence = one or more clauses Think of […]

Continue Reading

Verb Voice in English Grammar

Verbs‏‎ have a property known as Voice which allows you to show the relationship between the verb and the subject and object‏‎ in the sentence‏‎. If a verb is in the Active Voice then it shows the subject performing an action: the subject does something If, however, a verb is […]

Continue Reading

Utterances in English

An Utterance is the spoken equivalent to a sentence‏‎. As a sentence is bounded by a capital letter‎ and a period or full stop (or other punctuation‏‎) so an utterance is often (though not always) bounded by silence or a breath or pause. Having said this, there is no precise […]

Continue Reading

Typographical Conventions

This page describes the typographical conventions we use in the Grammar Guide and generally on the IWeb TEFL site. Examples Examples are shown thus: This is a grammar example. Following common convention, ungrammatical sentences are marked with an asterisk: * This is grammatical not. Note that In some grammars‏‎ (although […]

Continue Reading

The Passive Voice in English Grammar

English sentence‏‎s are mostly built using a simple pattern known as SVO‏‎ which stands for Subject + Verb‏ + Object‏‎:‎ {subject} + {verb} + {object} Madeleine + broke + the wine glass. The most important information in a sentence‏‎ usually comes at the beginning and in the examples above we’re […]

Continue Reading