Irina Lutsenko

A student once asked me, “ What kind of students do you find difficult? ” I couldn’t reply immediately, but this question lingered in my mind for months. In this post, I want to answer my student's question. First, I’ll give some context. I don’t teach at a state school or a university. I do in-company training and prepare students for international exams. My students take classes voluntarily because they use English at work or because they want to enrol in university programs taught in English. For me, difficult students are people who: don't know what they want. Some students come and say they want IELTS preparation. They don’t know anything about the test, but they think it’s a good idea to have the certificate. Sooner or later they realize they don’t really need it, so they decide they want to work with TED talks because they are sick and tired of coursebooks. But working with TED talks turns out to be harder than working with coursebooks, so they change the...

This post was written on demand. Students ask me to teach English punctuation on a regular basis. It is usually neglected in EFL course books because (I’m guessing) students are supposed to learn it intuitively through reading (which works, to some degree). But when they start writing a lot, especially in business or academic contexts, they realize that they don’t know how to punctuate in English. In this post, I want to outline the most common cases of comma use. 1. Use a comma before the conjunctions and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet if they link two main clauses. The book was boring, but I decided to finish reading it anyway. The test was difficult, so the teacher gave us more time. If you link two main clauses with a coordinating conjunction, you need to use a comma. But you don’t need to use a comma if you link two parts of the sentence with the same subject. Compare: You should read and watch movies in English. (same subject) The book was boring, but I decided to ...