Teaching Irregular Adverbs

Irregular Adverbs Explained to Beginners.

When teaching Beginners you should always work on the principle that any detailed grammar explanation will be too complicated for them.

When needing to explain a new grammar item like irregular adverbs, for example, start from what your students already know.

Put on the chalkboard a couple of examples of regular adverbs:

                       slow			slowly

                       quick			quickly

Then using pictures or models, encourage this dialogue:

• Teacher to L1: Is this a slow car? L1: Yes, it’s a slow car.

• Teacher to L2: Is this a quick airplane? L2: No, it’s a slow airplane.

• Teacher to L3: Is this a slow animal? L3: No, it’s a quick animal, that’s a slow animal.

• Teacher to L4: Is that man going slowly? L4: No, he’s going quickly.

And so on.

Then on the board write:

                       slow	slowly

                       quick	quickly

                       fast	fast

Make a few sentences as examples:

Using a model car show that quick and fast mean the same.

                       quick car	fast car

                                  BUT

                       goes quickly	goes fast

You can use this very simple explanation: "For the name we say quick or fast, for the doing word we say quickly or fast. Fast always stays the same."

So, showing more pictures:

• Teacher to L5 Is he a fast runner? L5: Yes, he’s a fast runner.

• Teacher to L6: Is this a fast boat? L6: No, it’s a slow boat

• Teacher to L7: Is this boat going slowly? L7: No it’s going fast.

Now write up on the board: Yes / No /Very

• Teacher to L8: Is this a fast airplane (Points to Yes and Very) L8: Yes, it’s a very fast plane.

• Teacher to L9: Is it going slowly? (Points to NO and Very) L9: No it’s going very fast.

And so on.

In the next few lessons you can introduce:

               loud	loudly
               soft	softly
               happy	happily
               easy	easily

               high	high
               deep	deep
               low	low
               hard	hard

It really depends on the content of the syllabus, but the idea is to develop a range of this type of vocabulary. You can also add lexical items like jump, run, swim, sing, write, etc. (Your students will already have learnt some of these terms).

Before the end of the year many teachers will be giving activities like sheets of pictures with captions to be completed and sentences to be completed. So the explanation becomes part of the lesson and part of the learning process. This is good teaching!