Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Michigan? Are you interested in teaching English in Assyria, Michigan? Check out our opportunities in Assyria, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
This unit gives me a detailed look into modal auxiliary verbs and the passive voice, as well as an overview of phrasal verbs and relative clauses.
1. Modal Auxiliary Verbs (or "modals"):
- The "modals" are placed before verbs to add meaning to the main verb and express different ideas such as: obligation, possibility/probability, permission/prohibition, ability, advice etc.
- Modal auxiliary verbs can also be used to express differing degrees of formality.
- Modal verbs don't change in form according to person and are followed by a verb in its base form.
2. Passive voice:
- The passive is where the object of an active verb (transitive) becomes the subject of the sentence/clause, and the focus on the doer of the action is shifted to the object of the action. Hence, in a passive voice, the doer is much less important, or doesn't even appear in the sentence.
- Form: For both the active voice and the passive voice, the tense of the sentence always remains the same. In the passive voice the tense is indicated by the auxiliary verb "be", while in the active voice, the tense is shown by the main verb.
- Usage:
+ When it is not known, not important, or we don't want to say exactly who performs an action.
+ In case we want to reveal who performs the action, the passive can be used with a "by + the agent/doer" phrase.
+ This use is not mentioned in this unit, but I have realized that the passive voice is also used when we want to put the focus/attention on the object affected by the action in a sentence.
- Just like any other grammatical language point, there are also typical errors/mistakes which students often make when using working on passive voice, and the teacher should be aware of to help them.
3. Relative clauses (adjective clause):
- A relative clause is a dependent clause (a group of words containing a subject and a verb) that modifies a noun. It is introduced by a relative pronoun: who, which, that, whose, whom, etc. or there may be no relative pronoun. We have two types of relative clauses:
+ Defining relative clause: the information given in the clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence.
+ Non-defining relative clause: the information given in the clause is not essential in the sentence and can be taken out without substantially changing the meaning of the sentence.
4. Phrasal verbs (multi-word verbs): consist of a verb plus one or to particles, and they together operate as one item. There are three basic types of phrasal verbs:
- Type 1 - Intransitive: the phrasal verb cannot be followed by a direct object.
- Type 2 - Transitive separable: the phrasal verb is followed by a direct object. The object pronoun can only come between the verb and the particle, or, the object noun can come either between the verb and the particle or after the particle.
- Type 3 - Transitive inseparable: the phrasal verb is followed by a direct object. The object phrase or object pronoun both come after the particle. This type also includes phrasal verbs which have two particles.
Once again, I appreciate this unit since it is a good revision of the grammar points I had learnt before.
