Helping Verbs
Also known as Auxiliary Verbs, these small verbs work together with main verbs to form verb strings. These include the standard auxiliaries BE, HAVE, and DO, as well as Modal Auxiliaries.
Auxiliary Verbs are often responsible for designating tense, aspect, mood, and voice. The also play crucial roles in sentence structure, especially when it comes to negative, inversion, and ellipses. As simple as Helping Verbs seem, understanding them is essential for good grammar.
Leading Auxiliaries
Auxiliaries & Tenses
Modal Verbs
Modal Verb Flavors
Modals of Permission & Obligation
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General Notes
Colored Text
Our videos feature selective colored text. Colors stand out and help students know what to pay attention to. We’re rather consistent with our color choices so that students learn to expect certain things from certain colors. We recommend using this same technique yourself. Read our article to learn more.
Focus on Structure & Usage
Most of our methods are all about either sentence structure or usage. We touch on forms of individual words less often, and we hardly ever address infection or pronunciation. All five of these are important, but form and pronunciation tend to be more straightforward, so we let teachers decide for themselves how to present those. We dedicate our resources to the trickier stuff.
Working in Phrases
Most of the time when we say ‘noun’, we actually mean ‘noun phrase’, which typically includes determiners (like articles, possessives, and quantifiers) and sometimes adjectives. We often do the same with verb strings; auxiliary verbs, ‘not’, and sometimes adverbs are included when we say ‘verb’.
Within the framework of a sentence, combining all those individual words into one block is generally helpful, as they act together to serve a single purpose.
American English
We mostly use American English, although most ESOL books primarily use British English. We do this because our founder and lead content creator is American, so it’s what comes natural to him. Just think of this as an excuse to teach your students some of the differences between British English and American English.