If we got a dollar every time a student said “I’m boring” or “I’m exciting” instead of “I’m bored/excited,” we’d all be multi-millionaires. 💸💸💸

This mistake happens because students tend to learn words like “boring/bored” and “exciting/excited” at the same time and then confuse them for the rest of their lives. Luckily, there are ways to fix this nightmare of a grammar mistake … once and for all!

Anchor

When explaining difficult concepts, it helps to link them to something students already know. A word that students learn early on can help: “tired.” Most students don’t know that it has an -ing form (tiring) until much later, so you’ve probably never heard a student say “I’m tiring.” Well, we can use this to our advantage.

Some intermediate students who watch a lot of English TV will also know the word “amazing” without knowing “amazed,” so you can provide this as an example as well.

Whether you chose tired or amazing, you’ve now given students an example they can anchor themselves to. Then, next time a student confuses -ed and -ing, we can remind them of their anchor: “‘I’m exciting is incorrect. You mean ‘I’m excited.’ It’s like ‘I’m tired.’”

And for most beginners, this explanation is more than enough. If necessary, you can further reinforce the concept with this memory trick: “-ing is for things.”

Explain

If you have an intermediate or advanced student, you can explain the actual differences between -ed and -ing adjectives. An easy way to do this is to say that -ed adjectives describe how someone feels while -ing adjectives describe the cause of the feeling.

• English grammar is confusing. I’m confused by all the rules.
• English grammar is boring. Learning grammar makes me bored.

For students who are familiar with grammar terms, you can explain the difference using the concept of passive and active voice. Generally, -ed makes a verb passive, e.g. “I was chased by a dog.” On the other hand, -ing means that the verb is active, e.g. “The dog is chasing me.”

So when we say “I’m confused,” it means “I’m confused (by grammar rules).” And when we say “grammar is confusing,” we mean “grammar is confusing (me).”

This explanation is more comprehensive than the “use -ed for yourself and -ing for things” rule , since it also explains why you can say things like “I’m amazing” or “He’s boring.” A person can also be the cause of feelings. For example:

• I went on a date with Bryan. He was boring. (= He was boring me.)
• My little sister is annoying. (= She is annoying me.)

You can also send students this video after the lesson if they want a more in-depth explanation:

Practice, Practice, Practice

Finally, give your students lots of practice hearing this grammar point in action. For example, when listening to your student share a story, you can respond using the following words:

• surprising/surprised (e.g. “That’s surprising!” “I’m not surprised to hear that.”)
• annoying/annoyed (e.g. “That sounds so annoying.” “You must have been annoyed.”)
• fascinating/fascinated (e.g. “That’s fascinating! Tell me more!” “I’m fascinated by this story.”)
• embarrassing/embarrassed (e.g. “That must have been an embarrassing moment for them!” “They must have been so embarrassed!”)
• tiring/tired (e.g. “It’s tiring cleaning the house!” “You must have been very tired!”)
• confusing/confused (e.g. “Sounds like it was a confusing lecture!” “You must have been confused by it”)
• exciting/excited (e.g. “It’s exciting to see them live!” “You must have been so excited!”)
• frightening/frightened (e.g. “That storm sounds frightening!” “You must have been very frightened!”)
• terrifying/terrified (e.g. “That sounds terrifying!” “You must have been terrified!”)

You can also encourage your student to practice with this grammar lesson:

And try to have them make example sentences related to their life. A lot of these words apply to English learning, so it shouldn’t be too hard for them (e.g. “learning English is frustrating”). If you need more contexts to help you make example sentences, check out this post.

📌 Takeaways

To sum up,

1. Anchor: Point out to the student that they already know an easy word (“tired”) that follows the -ed/-ing rule.
2. Explain: explain that -ed words are passive (as in “I was chased by a dog.”) and -ing words are active (“A dog was chasing me.”) and that this applies to boring vs. bored as well: “The class was boring (me)” vs. “I was bored (by the class).”
3. Practice: give the student lots of practice hearing and using this new grammar rule.

Don’t be surprised if the student still makes mistakes by the end of the lesson. They’ve probably been doing this years, and we all know that old habits die hard. But know that you’ve done humankind a deed by putting them on the right path!