The main grammar problems we have seen during our years of teaching IELTS have been: tenses, articles, prepositions and sentence structure. These are problem areas because different languages use these differently when expressing the same ideas as in English. For example, some languages such as Russian only have three tenses. This means that understanding the differences between the different past tenses in English can be a difficult concept to grasp. Also Russian does not use articles and its sentence structures are free compared to English. Therefore there are a lot of mental reajustments to be made in order to understand another language’s concept of describing the world around us.
In this section we will be focusing on these four areas: Tenses, Articles, Prepositions and Sentence Structure.
The reason for this desition is that we are assuming that those of you preparing for the IELTS test have a good level of English and do not need to revise basic grammar rules. If you need to do so, we suggest getting a copy of Raymond Murphy’s ‘English Grammar in Use’ intermediate book (see the ‘book reviews’ section of this blog).
Tenses:
english tenses made easy
Irregular Verb Groups:
Irregular verb groups
Prepositions:
A useful site to go on for the explanations of some common phrasal verbs is: http://www.learn-english-today.com/phrasal-verbs/phrasal-verb-list.htm
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