Ready-to-use materials

Negative Inversion: Real Life Examples

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But I’ve never heard anything like that!
Do people actually use it?

This is what my B2+ / C1 / C2 students often tell me whenever I try to teach them how to add emphasis using negative inversion. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since inverted and added auxiliaries are not always easily noticeable (i.e. salient in the input).

So, the aim of this mini-lesson is to expose students to a number of “real life” examples of negative inversion in order to (1) show them that negative inversion does exist and is used far more frequently than some people might think, and (2) train them to listen out for examples of negative inversion in the English that surrounds them.

You can use this mini-lesson to review or introduce negative inversion.

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Video lesson: James Bond rents a car!

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This is a video-based lesson for B1 and B2 students, suitable for both teens and adults. It focuses on skill development and introduces / reviews quite a lot of functional language students might find useful. These are the three key principles underlying the activities:
1. The first viewing task should allow students to actually watch (and enjoy) the video without too many distractions.
2. Subsequent viewing tasks should enable students to “squeeze the video dry” and understand as much as realistically possible without necessarily having to watch the whole thing again. In this day and age, when video is so ubiquitous, class time should be devoted to helping students do things they’re not naturally inclined / able to do on their own. Watching for gist is what many students will do on their own, anyway.
3. Important as skill development is, it’s not tangible enough for most students to perceive as “real learning.” This is why skills development should, as a rule, be accompanied by some sort of language input: lexis, functional language, grammar, or pronunciation.

The actual lesson starts here.

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