Biggest ESL Grammar Mistakes and How to Keep Your Students from Making Them
written by: Krystof-Sandor Harfst
Table of Content
Teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) is no easy task. Students have problems with just about everything, and grammar is no exception. For both them and you, it is key to catch those recurring ESL grammar mistakes as soon as they come up. Knowing what the most common errors are and not only how to prevent them from happening, but also how to address them correctly, will not only help you to develop better ESL students but could eventually help your learners become more fluent and accurate English speakers. In this post, we will take a look at the most prevalent ESL mistakes and propose some helpful solutions to prevent them and to guide you through the process. If students find themselves struggling to meet deadlines for written work, they can visit Academized, which offers services like write my term papers to provide professional writing support. Academized helps students by offering customized papers and essay writing assistance for those who need extra help managing their workload.
Confusing Present Simple and Present Continuous
One of the most common ESL problems is with the distinction between the present simple and the present continuous. Students will say ‘I am go to the store’ instead of ‘I go to the store’, and ‘I go to the store now’ instead of ‘I am going to the store’.
How to Prevent This Mistake
Make the elementary rules crystal-clear: present simple for habitual actions or facts, present continuous for things happening right now. And give lots of examples:
Present Simple: “She eats breakfast every day.”
Present Continuous: “She is eating breakfast now.”
Above all, practise regularly. Homework that requires students to role-play daily routines – describing what one would do in the morning to get ready, for example, or what one ate for breakfast, in the present perfect versus the simple past tense – can be a way to address issues of habitual use, of what feels natural. Recounting what is happening right now, or sketching out the typical trajectory of the current day, can also help students get used to alternating between the two tenses.
Misusing Articles (A, An, The)
Articles are a notoriously difficult area for ESL learners. Many languages don’t use articles at all, and so there are students who don’t use them at all, always, or misuse them, saying, for example, sentences such as: I have a book – I have a book The water is essential for life – Water is essential for life.
How to Prevent This Mistake
Start by teaching the basic rules:
A/An: Use with singular, countable nouns.
The: Use when talking about something specific or previously mentioned.
No article: Use with plural or uncountable nouns when speaking in general terms.
First, they can work in pairs, with one person reading out two sentences, such as: ‘She wants a dog.’ ‘She wants the dog.’ Giving an explanation of how the article changes the meaning will be a good test for them. Repeating this type of activity regularly and giving feedback on it will, in time, lead pupils to using articles correctly.
Incorrect Word Order in Questions
While forming questions may be an easy task for a native speaker, in some instances, like when there is a change in word order due to the type of verb used, it can be a challenge for ESL learners. Common mistakes that beginners make include ‘You like pizza?’ instead of ‘Do you like pizza?’ or ‘Where are you going?’ instead of ‘Where are you going?’
For example, studies reveal that at the low level of ESL students’ proficiency, more than 60 per cent of the beginners have difficulties with question formation. To improve their performance, some students may choose to seek help from legit essay writing services, which can provide quality assistance for various academic tasks.
How to Prevent This Mistake
Repetition is the mother of perfect questions. Start with basic word order and yes/no questions (ouch!). Then add the auxiliary verb ‘do’ or ‘does’. Drill it, drill it! Then try it again. In its simplest form:
“Do you like coffee?”
“Does he play soccer?”
After students get the hang of yes/no questions, try wh-questions (who, what, where etc). The auxiliary moves out front of the subject:
“What are you doing?”
“Where is she going?”
Use classroom activities like role-playing interviews or quizzes to reinforce correct question formation.
Confusion Between “There” and “It” as Sentence Subjects
Also common among beginner ESL students is to confuse ‘there’ and ‘it’: ‘It is a book on the table’ instead of ‘There is a book on the table.’ It is hard for some learners whose native languages do not employ the ‘there’ construction to know when they should use ‘there’ as a subject.
| Phrase | Correct Usage |
|---|---|
| There is a book on the table. | Use "there" to introduce the existence of something. |
| It is raining outside. | Use "it" for weather, time, or situations. |
| There are many people in the room. | Use "there" for plural nouns or multiple items. |
| It is important to study every day. | Use "it" as a general subject for ideas. |
However, an amount to be spent on study must be determined each day. Using ‘it’ as an abstract noun for ideas.
How to Prevent This Mistake
Teach students the different environments in which there and it are used. Continue to stress that it is used to ascertain existence or location, whereas it refers to the specific thing, idea or weather. Practice activities in which the correct option has to be selected, and use instant feedback to highlight any errors.
Overusing or Underusing Prepositions
Pick any two ESL learners at random and you’ll find plenty more odd ways prepositions vex them: the reverse of typical usage (‘in the car’ instead of ‘on the car’); dropping of prepositions entirely (‘I’ll wait you’ instead of ‘I’ll wait for you’).
How to Prevent This Mistake
Group prepositions by context (of time, of place, of movement), for example, and illustrate it with schema: on the table vs under the table, etc. Get students to use prepositions in actual context: describe where things are in the classroom, at home. At some point, these structures will just flow.
Problems with Subject-Verb Agreement
Subject-verb agreement is a notorious problem for ESL students, especially for more complicated sentences. You may have heard your students say: ‘The cats are hungry.’ Or perhaps: ‘He goes to school every day.’ This results from students either forgetting or failing to grasp that the verb agrees with its subject in number and person.
How to Prevent This Mistake
Have them drill verb forms based on singular and plural subjects, and why or how the verb changes based on the number of subjects. Starting with simple sentence fragments such as ‘The dog is/are hungry?’ can be a great way to work on filling in the correct verb form in the blank space. Have them fill in the missing verb in ‘The dog ___’. Then, do the same exercise with ‘The dogs ___ hungry’. Regular practice, both aloud and in writing, of sentences like these will help the correct form become automatic for your students.
Conclusion
Correcting common ESL grammar mistakes such as the present simple and present continuous, articles, questions, it/there, prepositions, and subject-verb agreement will motivate your students and significantly ease your teaching. When a problem is front and centre, time spent fixing it will be more successful than scattered efforts all over the place. By paying attention to these areas and providing opportunities for feedback and practice every week, you will see your students’ language improvement in a matter of weeks or even days.
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