Passive Forms
Passive Forms are a way to express the effect of a verb, rather than it’s cause or the verb itself. This series contains Passive Voice, which involves the entire structure of a sentence (or clause), and Passive & Active Adjectives, which modifies a noun phrase.
Passive Voice
Passive Voice: Verb Transformations
RECOMMENDATION: Visit the Passive Voice page first.
Passive & Active Adjectives
Patientive Verbs | Middle Voice
RECOMMENDATION: Visit the Passive Voice page first.
Premium Topics
include videos, bonus notes, printouts, slideshows, prerequisites, proficiency levels, practice activities, teaching tips, and relevant projects.
Discourse Topics
are usually only blocks of text, though some have graphics or tables. These topics read much more like a typical textbook might.
10TK Topics
feature videos of 10 THINGS TO KNOW about that topic. These pages also include bonus notes and a few additional things to know.
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.
In the Passive Forms series, we use blue for passive, red for actions, and green for active.
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.