Grammar and Vocabulary in Context
Grammar in ALTE is tested in context: sentence completion, error correction, transformation and vocabulary choice. The examiner wants the form the sentence requires, not the form that merely sounds familiar.
High-yield areas
- Tense and aspect: present perfect for a past action with present relevance; past perfect for the earlier of two past events.
- Subject-verb agreement: ignore intervening phrases; 'one of the' plus a plural noun takes a singular verb.
- Articles: a or an by sound; the for specified or unique reference.
- Prepositions: learn collocations such as depend on, insist on, superior to.
- Voice and narration: keep tense backshift consistent.
- Conditionals: second conditional for an unreal present, third for an unreal past.
- Modals: must, should, need not, dare not.
Vocabulary
- Synonym and antonym in context.
- Word formation across noun, verb, adjective and adverb families.
- Phrasal verbs and idioms learned as whole units.
- One-word substitution.
Worked example: 'Hardly had the bell rung ___ the students left.' The answer is 'when', because 'hardly ... when' is a fixed pair and the past perfect 'had rung' signals the inverted structure. Reasoning beats ear.
Traps that cost marks
- 'One of the boys were' is an agreement error.
- Dangling modifiers, as in 'Walking home, the rain began'.
- The wrong preposition after a verb.
- Changing tense mid-sentence in narration.
- Choosing a synonym that fits the dictionary but not the sentence.