I've recently been reminded (!) that I've let this blog 'fall by the wayside'.. A pang of guilt has led me to resurrect it, so here I am again.

In class this week we looked at Verb patterns, one of the trickiest areas of the language, mainly because there aren't many useful rules determining whether a verb is followed by the Infinitive or Gerund.

A verb pattern is when you have TWO verbs together: e.g. she enjoys cooking. When the first verb 'enjoy' is followed by another verb, the form of the verb must be -ing. An example of a verb+infinitive would be 'decide': He decided to tell the truth.

Often, your instinct will tell you what is right - you've probably read and heard a lot of these patterns many times before, so you may get an idea of what sounds right.

By the way, if you're interested in haggis, you could try this gap-fill exercise.

If you like lists, you might like this

For sentence transformations, you could try this little guy. And remember Flo-joe is a good source of practice activities for CAE

Don't forget your homework! - I gave a handout on verb patterns in class and there was a sentence transformations exercise on the back.

• If you missed the class, we did some work on verb patterns on page 36 - 7, and started Unit 4, page 42/3. We also watched some example videos of the speaking test pts 3 & 4.

By the way - 5 students did the writing homework last week. Great news! Presumably this means that everyone else is so good at writing that they don't need any practice... :-)