How to place your students Part 3

Following our previous articles, now it is the finally two levels that your students should be able to perform. However, please keep this in mind that many school in Taiwan place students according to their age, not with their ability. Often you will have class full with beginners and one kid who can speak perfect and fluent English.


Upper-intermediate
At this level students can speak and write with reasonable fluency using a range of tenses and expressions for linking ideas. They can use appropriate language in a variety of situations demonstrating an understanding of formal and informal language.
Grammar to cover includes:
✓ To have something done: students are used to speaking about actions they do themselves. With this grammatical structure they can express the idea of paying or instructing other people to do things. For example, I had my house painted.
✓ Third conditional: If I had known, I wouldn’t have done it.
✓ Reported speech: She said that she . . .
✓ Defining relative clauses: The man who is standing over there is nervous.

✓ Modal verbs in the past: I could have come.
✓ Passive verb forms: The room was cleaned.
✓ The verb to wish: I wish I could go, you wish you were me (after wish you use a verb in one of the past tenses, so students have to learn this verb separately)
✓ To be used to/ to get used to: I'm used to London now but I'm still getting used to my new job. Students easily confuse these two grammatical structures.
✓ Past perfect continuous tense: I had been working.
✓ Future perfect: I will have written it.
Vocabulary to cover includes:
✓ Adjectives of personality: generous, manipulative.
✓ Medical problems: ache, bruise, sprain.
✓ Crime words: to arrest, fraud, mugging.
✓ Feelings: hurt, fascinated, relieved.
✓ Science and technology words: software, appliance.
✓ Media and communications words: broadcasting, the press.


Advanced
Students at this level are able to communicate with native speakers without much difficulty. They get the gist of most texts and conversations and have sufficient vocabulary to express themselves on a wide variety of topics. The grammar and vocabulary they use is similar to that of native speakers even when it's not strictly necessary to be understood. Question tags, which showed in the following grammar list, provide a good example of this.
Grammar to cover includes:
✓ Prefixes and suffixes: respect/ disrespect/ disrespectful
✓ Compound nouns: tooth + paste = toothpaste.
✓ Active and stative verbs (actions and conditions): She bought (active) a motorbike and also owns (stative) a car.
✓ Future perfect continuous tense: I will have been working.
✓ Detailed rules on phrasal verbs: Phrasal verbs consist of a verb and a preposition or two that together make a new meaning. For example: to get on with someone, to put up with something.
Vocabulary to cover includes:
✓ Newspaper headlines. There are a number of words that are favorites for newspapers but hardly used elsewhere, for example, Minister Rapped After Expenses Probe. Journalists also like to be very playful with the language. They use nicknames, rhymes, and slang and students want to be in on the joke so that they can understand the press for themselves. However, it sometimes takes a great deal of explaining and a detailed
analysis of the language for students to get the point.
✓ Words with different connotations. Old and elderly have basically the same meaning. However, elderly is more polite than old when referring to people, so the connotation (attitude behind the word) is different. When students understand that words have similar meanings they also need to know the subtle but important differences between them.
✓ Metaphors and similes. You use metaphors when you say that one thing is another because they're somehow similar. There was a storm of protest. Storm is a word that describes violent weather conditions but here it means a violent outburst.
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