Welcome to the School Year 2020-2021! (A-2)

Welcome to the new school year 2020-2021. Here are we to start with English after a very hard time without practising it but we are ready to start again.. This year has some changes because of the pandemia the pandemia but we'll solve any problem we could have, you'll see.

Our class is Nivel Básico 2 (A2-F) so most of the activities will be oriented to this level. Nevertheless, I'll include other levels if necessary and if you want to review something, in this very blog there are entries for A1 as well son you can have a look. Last Thursday we saw the alphabet and the numbers in class and you can use the previous entry for revision.

We also started with the textbook but we only worked with QUESTIONS. This is some useful information if you don't have the book yet or if you want to refresh this grammar point :

• Questions: The general characteristic of English questions is the use of an auxiliary verb in the inversion at the beginning of the sentence. Let's see how this auxiliary works depending on the type of question you're using:
• YES/NO questions: they need this kind of answer so they are also called "total" questions. The structures is AUXILIARY+SUBJECT+VERB. These are some examples:
• Is he in our class?  -----  Yes, he is.
• Do they speak German?   -----  No, they don't
• Did you study English here last school year?  -----  Yes, I did
• Can you understand me?  -----  Yes, we can.
• Are you coming home early today?  -----  Yes, I am.
• "Partial" questions:  also called wh-questions, when you only ask something in particular, that is, a "part" of the sentence; these questions start with WH-words but you also have the inversion, as you can see in these examples:
• WHERE was he born?  -----  He was born in Murcia.
• HOW MANY children have you got?  -----  I've got 2, a boy and a girl.
• HOW MUCH sugar do you need?  -----  Just a little.
• WHY did you phone her yesterday?  ------  Because I wanted to meet her.
• Exceptions: when the WH-word has the function of the subject you don't have to use the inversion; have a look at the examples to see how they work:
• WHO is coming tonight?  -----   A few friends (THEY are coming)
• HOW MANY friends are coming?  -----  Just 3 or 4 close friends.
• WHAT happened to you?  -----  Nothing (nothing happened to me).

If you need some more information about questions you can use this link  and this other link is very useful as well. After reviewing the grammar, let's practise with some exercises:

• exercise 1 (very easy)       
• exercise 2 (to practise with HAVE and HAVE GOT as we saw in class)      
• exercise 3 (using WH-word in questions)    
• exercise 4 (do this exercise just for fun!)

If you want to practise in a different way, to listen to Are you lonely tonight? by Elvis Presley (half of the song is just the singer reciting the lyrics!)  : click here

See you in class!