February 2020 – English Grammar Pro

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The B1 / B2 divide seems to have many clashing or repeated points when locating forms. This post introduces another. The B2 points 153 in the category of MODALITY “be supposed to” to talk about expectation or obligation, and point 130 also in MODALITY ” be supposed to’ to talk about hearsay or supposition clashes […]

We cannot use “text inspector”, “Write and improve” or the “complexity checker” software to predict the level of students between b1 and b2.

How do complexity checkers compare?

Sadly through the Sketch Engine, we do not get access to A1 or A2 level texts from the learner corpus. It is for this reason, this short test will be run starting at B1 level students. All the concordances will be gathered searching for the very common article “a”. The following concordance lines are randomly […]

In the English Grammar Profile, point 151 in MODALITY “be forced to’ is used to talk about an unnamed obligation, where the circumstances are beyond the control of the speaker/writer. I was interested to see what some of the stand-out infinitives would be with this structure. On the iWeb corpus _vb* forced to _v?i* finds […]

Here’s an introduction to doing research.

We can’t talk about grammar if we do not consider the study of language in relation to its use in social settings.

There are four entries in the English Grammar Profile that capture “May I…?” Point 97 are polite questions. They probably are not really asking for permission. 119 is literally asking for permission. Yet, for the purposes of designating a complexity level, this matters little. The interpretation of this structure becomes more difficult once we jump […]

Which verbs are found next to “may well”?

Assessment always seems negative when we think about it. Yet it is not just a way to check that students have learnt something. It can be learning itself.