For teachers

C Information for teachers

How I came to create these exercises

I am not an expert on grammar like Michael Swann, for example. For definitive rulings on matters of grammar, I recommend you always to refer to a source such as Michael Swann’s Practical English Usage’.

The exercises on this site were developed for two reasons.

·         First, because I sometimes found that my students were sometimes having problems with other sources such as Raymond Murphy’s brilliant ‘English Grammar in Use’, for example.

·         Second, I often found that I needed to offer something additional to my students.

I had three motives for adding to already available grammar material.

·         First, I wanted to address a particular topic in a different way to those already available in the standard textbooks.

·         Second, I wanted to use vocabulary etc specially chosen for my students – for example, because they were adults, not schoolchildren.

·         Third, I only had one or two book exercises available on a particular topic, and after my students had done it / them, they still needed more practice.

Rainschool’s unique identity

I must be careful not to undersell myself by being too modest! On the downside, Rainschool does not contain exercises on every element of grammar. Nor does it offer exercise below pre-intermediate level. For students below this level, I believe that a face-to-face teacher is necessary. On the positive side, the explanations and exercises here are geared to practical use of English, not to academic purity. My concern is not theory, but practicality – the student wanting to use the language. As a result, I believe that my approach is often quite novel, and there is certainly no deliberate copying here from other sources. Finally, all the exercises here have been road-tested in the classroom, and refined as a result. I believe you can be confident that whatever you find here, it will work and be fit for purpose.

 Re-formatting exercises for the web

When I began to upload my classroom exercises to the site, I had a surprise. I realised that I had always produced exercises for students with whom I would be in face-to-face classroom contact. The web was something different. In fact, I have had to create many more explanation files, almost one for every practice file, because only in this way can students work alone. However, I think that these explanation files, which use carefully graded language, should be at least as useful to teachers as the actual practice exercises. At the same time, I take advantage of web publication to re-examine and, more often than not, make further improvements to my original exercises

My approach to teaching

Let me finish by recounting a personal anecdote. One day, some years ago, I was sitting around with other members of staff and we were all moaning about a particularly useless bunch of students: a class who nobody seemed able to teach any English to, because they were just too stupid. After perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes of this – a conversation I had heard on other occasions in other places, if never to quite such an extreme degree – I suddenly found myself saying to myself: ‘this is too easy. What if I take the attitude that the problem is not that these students are incapable of learning, but that we are incapable of teaching them.’

This was a ‘light bulb’ moment for me. I walked out of there determined to explore my own performance, to discover what I had to do to succeed with these students where so far I had failed. From then on, I have tried never again to accuse a student of not being able to understand me. I try always to respond to an uncomprehending student, or class of students, by saying: I’m sorry, I haven’t been able to help you understand this – let me see if I can do it in a different way.’

The point is this: in some cases maybe the student, not myself, is the one really at fault. Yet I can never be SURE of this. More important still, the moment I myself genuinely make efforts to overcome the stuck situation, I am sending the right signal to the students: ‘when faced with a difficulty, take responsibility. Don’t sit back and wait for someone else to do the work for you.’ If I’m willing to make an extra effort, then the student probably will be also.

 Contact me

So, teachers, please feel free to contact me through the comments facility, or via sales@rainschool.com and I will endeavour to help with any problems arising from anything on this site. Apart from that, may I take this opportunity to wish you all a good time with your English classes!

Peter Ryley

Hastings, England

April 2009

Update: December 2009 - coming any moment!