Typical student problems with “There is/ There are”

Another pronunciation issue is that “There” is often pronounced the same as

“They’re” and “Their”, leading to difficulties in understanding which of those is
meant. It is also easy to write the wrong one, even for native speaker writers.

A problem that is dealt with in textbooks more often is students choosing the right
one between “There is” and “There are”. This common

tudent difficulty isn’t helped by the fact that native speakers often say and even
write sentences like “There’s all kinds of problems with this machine”. Looking at
that kind of native speaker usage another way, though, we could say their abuse of
“There’s” is a good reason for students not to obsess over this point, which I
consider less important for many students than simply making an effort to use the
“There is/ are” form.

Many students try to avoid “There is/ are”, instead using forms like “It has” and “It
is” when “There…” would be more suitable, sometimes because the equivalent
forms in their own language could be translated that way. Translation is again
probably the best way of dealing with this, or you could explain that “It” usually has
an actual thing it refers to, whereas the “there” in “There is/ are” is basically
meaningless. You could also explain or at least get them used to using “There is/
are” to show numbers and existence and lack of existence.

A minor but complicated point is the difficulty of knowing when to say “There
aren’t any… (s)” and when to use “There isn’t a…” for negative statements. The
rather vague but simple rule is that if you would expect there to be one it’s usually
the latter, making sentences like “There isn’t a teacher in the classroom today”
sensible but “There isn’t an ant in the ant hill” a little strange.

If you want to present something new to students who have studied this point
before and might not be satisfied just with revision and speaking, a good candidate
is the fact that we say “There is a table and three chairs” but “There are three chairs
and a table”, despite them meaning exactly the same thing. The simple explanation
is that we follow the next word quite often in English, as in saying “It’s an orange
table” even though the noun “table” doesn’t start with a vowel sound. If further
explanation is needed, the fundamental reason could well be because when we
mention the first thing in a list of, say, things in our bedroom, we probably haven’t
decided what the second thing that we say will be yet.

How to present “There is/ There are”

If you present students with some sentences in context, it is usually very easy for
them to work out basically what is meant by “There is/ are”. Although I usually try
to avoid translation in the classroom as much as anyone, as there is a simple and
almost perfect translation for the basic meaning of “There is/ are” in most
languages (“hay” in Spanish, “aru/ iru” in Japanese, etc) and no close English
synonym, it seems silly to avoid translation in this case. If you want to avoid the
teacher speaking L1 in the classroom, just ask students to translate it and confirm if
their translation is correct. If a detailed English explanation of its fundamental
meaning is needed, the closest equivalent is “… exists”, making it different from “It
is/ They are…”, which means “That thing/ Those things…”

Given three or four good example sentences, it is also pretty easy for students to
work out the rules for when to use “There is” and when to use “There are”,
especially if you present this point well before doing uncountable nouns. The basic
rule is that “There are” is followed by a plural noun, usually meaning “noun+s” but
obviously also similar irregular plural forms like “people” and “children”. For that
reason, “There are” is often followed by determiners that go before plural nouns
such as a number, “many”, “a few” and “a couple of”. Nouns which aren’t plural go
after “There is” (the fact that “not plural” means both singular and uncountable is
probably best left until later to explain).

Rather than just presenting example sentences and going straight onto the analysis
stage, I tend to ask students to use the forms before trying to remember and then
analyse them. For example, I often start by getting students to agree on and
complete sentence stems on the topic of the week like “There is a good
________________ near here” and “There are too many ___________________ in this city”.
They are then given the same sentence with at least some part of the “There is” and
“There are” forms removed to complete, e.g. “_____ _______ too many dogs in this
city”. They then try to work out why each form is needed in each case.

“There is/ There are sentence completion guessing game” below also works well
with this kind of TTT (“Test Teach Test”) lesson structure.

There is there are games and other classroom practice activities

Most of the activities below are for the early presentation of this point which is
suggested in the introduction, meaning without the need to already understand
the more challenging forms like uncountable nouns. The activities are often also
suitable for young learners.

There is/ There are speaking race

This is perhaps the simplest game for this grammar point. The teacher or a student
asks a “How many.,.. are there?” question such as “How many chairs are there (in
this room)?” or “How many women are there (in the picture)?” and the other
people race to count and shout out the answer, preferably as a full sentence like
“There are three windows”, “There are no bins”, “There isn’t a dog” or “There is one
blackboard”. Instead of people just making up their own questions, you can get
them to pick a card with a noun that they must ask about, a letter that they must
use to start the noun (“How many baskets are there?” with “B”, etc), or a question
that gets the number that they have picked as an answer. With pictures, it’s
obviously most fun with a very detailed picture like “Where’s Wally?” You could also
ask them to race to write correct sentences as well as or instead of speaking.

There is/ There are run and touch

This is a more physical version of the game above. When asked a “How many… are
there?” question, the students run and touch those things as they count them, then
shout out the correct answer once they have sat down again.

A more controlled version with more of a possible range of language is for

students to do the same with pictures, having to touch things and count them
before writing and/ or saying “There are four monkeys” etc. This works best if there
is one large picture per group of two to four students, or if students work in teams
and one person from each team touches and counts things on the picture stuck to
or projected onto the board. If they are working with small pictures on their own,
you could ask them to circle or colour in the correct objects rather than just
touching them.

A running and touching game with more speaking is explained below.

There is/ There are continue the sentences challenge

In this game, students try to continue a sentence in a way which means it is both
grammatically correct and true. The way I like to do this is throwing a ball around
the room, with each person adding one word as they throw the ball on, leading to
sentences like “There” “are” “four” “legs” “on” “the” “table” and “There” “is” “not”
“an” “elephant” “in” “this” “room”. As with the latter example, you can have the rule
that students can add “not” to the sentence if they like. People who can’t think of
anything to say, pause too long or say something that isn’t true (or isn’t
grammatically correct if you want to be strict about that) have to leave that round
of the game or give up one point.

This idea can be combined with the run and touch game above by people racing to
run, touch and count the thing that the last person adds to the sentence as soon as
they do so, e.g. running, touching and counting the board pens as soon as they
hear the last part of “There” “are” “four” “board pens”. As with the simpler game
above, the person speaking must listen carefully to what the previous people say
and make sure that what they say matches both grammatically and factually.

There is/ There are stations

An even simpler TPR game is for someone to ask questions like “Are there three
chairs in the classroom?” and “Is there a clock tower in London?” and the people
listening to run and touch cards saying “Yes” and “No” on opposite walls of the
classroom, shouting out the correct short answer at the same time. You can also
play it with four walls, with “… there is” and “… there are” being different walls each
time.

If you want to work on accurate use of “is” and “are” with “there”, you can have
those two words as the things which should be run to and touched. Things that
they listen could be gapped sentences (“There ______ no spiders in the classroom”)
or questions (“How many board erasers are there?”). You will probably also want to
get students shouting out the whole correct sentence as they touch “is” or “are”.

There is/ There are flashcard activities

Holding up picture flashcards is obviously a good way to elicit and drill sentences
like “Therre is a cat on the mat” and “There are some bears in the forest”, but they
can also be used in more fun ways. This can be done by revealing the cards very
quickly for students to shout out the answer as quickly as possible, flashing the
cards past the students for them to try to spot or guess, or revealing the cards very
slowly for students to shout out as soon as they are fairly sure what they show. See
memory games below for one more idea.

There is/ There are memory games

Students ask each other “There is/ are” questions about things they have seen but
can’t see anymore, e.g. “How many apples are there on page 12?” about their
textbooks, “Where are there three boxes?” about their classroom (with the people
who must answer having their eyes closed), or “Are there any forks?” about a still
life scene of kitchen toys which has just been covered with a cloth.

Testing students’ memory is a good way of extending an elicitation and drilling

stage with picture flashcards of “There is a lion under the stairs” etc. When you
have finished drilling the whole pack of cards, see how much students can
remember with questions like “Is there an elephant under the stairs?”, “How many
penguins are there in the shower?” and “What is (there) under the carpet?”

There is/ There are discuss and agree

This activity, which was mentioned as a way of presenting “There is/ are” can also of
course be used as a practice stage. At this stage students might be able to do
activity without the help of sentence stems, but they will probably need some
suggested topics such as “this area”, “this country”, “entertainment”, “eating out”,
“things to do in the morning” and “green spaces” to help them agree on and write
down sentences like “There are enough pubs in this area”.

How many are there answer me

Students ask “How many… are there (in…)?” questions that they think they will get
particular answers to, for example “How many books are there in your house?”
because the card that they are holding says “About 100”, “How many classroom are
there in your school?” because no one has said “There are seventeen” yet, “How
many people are there in the world?” because they just secretly wrote “There are
over seven billion” in their notebooks, or “How many lights are there in this room?”
because they just rolled a six on the dice.

There is/ There are make me say yes

Students get one point for each time they can get a “Yes, there is” or “Yes, there
are” answer from their partner, with no points for “No there isn’t/ aren’t”. To make
this more challenging, students can be given particular topics, places, nouns etc to
ask about, and/ or they can be made to aim for a particular one of the two positive
answer with the flip of the coin, e.g. only points for “Yes, there is” if they throw
heads.

There is/ There are short answers answer me

Students ask questions to get “Yes, there is”, “Yes, there are”, “No, there isn’t” or
“No, there aren’t” answers, depending on which cards they are holding, what side
of the dice comes up, where their sticky ball lands on the board, etc. With the card
game, the students can discard their cards as they get answers that they are
holding, and the person with fewest cards when the game finishes wins. This can
also be combined with “How many are there answer me” above by having cards
saying “There are three” etc as well as the Yes and No ones.

I don’t know how many there are

Students get one point for each “How many… are there?” questions that someone
else says “I don’t know” to. This is most fun if they are asked questions about their
own house and other members of their family with questions that they probably
don’t know the answer to like “How many towels are there in your bathroom?” and
“How many music tracks are there on your father’s mobile phone?”

How many are there trivia quizzes

Students ask each other questions like “How many Spanish Steps are there?” and
“How many pyramids are there in Egypt?”, perhaps giving hints like “No, there are
far more” and “No, there are a few less” until the person who is answering reaches
exactly the right number. The information can come from worksheets that you give
them, from the internet, or just from their own knowledge.

If they’ve done uncountable nouns, they could also ask “How much liquid is there
in…?” etc.

There is/ There are drawing games

Sentences like “There are seven elephants” and “There is a huge mouse” are great
for drawing amusing pictures of classrooms, zoos, streets, amusement parks, etc.
The easiest way of organising the activity is for “Yes” and “No” replies to decide
whether the things mentioned in questions like “Are there twelve shoes?” and “Is
there a monster?” should make it into the picture or not. Things that get “No”
answers are either drawn crossed out or are just left out of the picture. The “Yes” or
“No” answers can be decided by the next student, by a vote of all students, by the
flip of a coin, or by throwing a ball at something saying those two things such as
two halves of the whiteboard.

Drawing can be done in a similar way with “How many chimneys are there?”, “How
many clouds are there?”, “How many witches are there?” etc. Again, the answer can
be decided by students or by chance, e.g. with a dice that has numbers zero to five
rather than one to six.

You can also get students to make sentences that should be put into the drawing
like “There are three churches” and “There isn’t a sun”. Students could just take
turns saying and/ or writing what they want to go in the picture (or not go in the
picture if they make negative sentences to stop other people doing so). However, it
is more fun to add a random element. One possibility is for students to throw a
dice or throw at numbers on the board and make a sentence with that number to
go in the picture (or not if the number zero came up). Other ways of adding
randomness is for students to pick a letter that the noun in their sentence must
start with, or simply a card with a noun on it. A more fun version is for students to
write any sentences they like and put them in a bag. Between five and ten
sentences are then taken out at random for each of the scenes which are drawn on
the board, leading to scenes like six exercise bicycles in the office and two
photocopiers in the school gym.

A more complex drawing game for more intensive practice of the grammar and
reading is for students to put together words on cards that have been spread
across the table to make the sentences that they want to draw or have drawn, e.g.
“There” “are” “twelve” “snakes” for the living room picture.

There is/ There are test your senses

Students test each other on what is in a bag full of things such as plastic fruit, doll
house furniture and soft toys with questions like “Is there a teddy bear?” and/ or
“How many saucers are there?” The game is most fun if they are allowed to feel the
bag to help them guess, but they could also guess from just the size and shape.

There is/ There are sentence completion guessing game

Students complete at least half of the sentences that they are given to make true
statements about themselves, their family, their home, their local area, etc. For
example, they could add “notebooks” to the gapped sentence “There are seven
______________ in my house” and “convenience store” to the sentence “There isn’t a
___________________ near my house”. They then read out just the part that they have
written (“notebooks” etc) for their partners to guess which sentence it came from.

There is/ There are bluffing games

There are several ways of using lying as the game element in speaking activities for
this language point. Perhaps the simplest is for students to make sentences that
are wrong in only one aspect like “There are blue stars in the dome of our
parliament building”, “There are twenty three stripes on the American flag” and
“There are only two chairs in my dining room” for other people to try and make
factual. The part that is changed can be the number, positive and negative,
position, etc.

Bluffing can also be combined with sentence stems in a similar way to the sentence
completion guessing game above. Students fill around half of the gaps in 15 to 30
sentences like “There aren’t any ________________ in my bathroom at the moment”
with true information, and the other half with false information. Their partners then
try to spot which is which, perhaps after asking extra questions like “Why aren’t
there?”

There is/ There are magazine search

Students describe something from a picture in a book or magazine that they have
in front of them such as “There are two brown hats” and “There are many really tall
men”. The other people then race to find pictures showing exactly that in their
books or magazines. This is easiest if students all have the same book or magazine
(e.g. their textbooks if they have enough pictures in them), but can work with many
different editions of National Geographic etc. There is there are something
unique Students try to think of statements with “There is” or “There are” which only
have one online search result such as “There is a pink ostrich” (a real example that I
just found). They search to see if that is true (or ask the teacher to do so), then try
again. The team with the most examples and/ or the most amusing ones wins the
game.

There is/ There are personalised gapped sentences guessing game

Students write incomplete true sentences about their room, bag, house, street, area
etc for other people to guess the missing words of, e.g. “There are ________ pairs of
shoes in my cupboard”, “There ____________ twenty pairs of shoes in my cupboard”,
“There are twenty _______________ in my cupboard”, “There are twenty pairs of shoes
_____________ my cupboard” or “There are twenty pairs of shoes in my
__________________”.

I hope there are many

Students ask each other “How many… are there (in…)?” about each other’s houses
and the number that is in the answer is the number of points that they get, e.g. no
points if the answer to the question “How many CDs are there in your living room?”
is “There aren’t any CDs in my living room” and 35 points if the answer to “How
many toy soldiers are there in your bedroom?” is that number.

There is/ There are hints game

Students guess what is being spoken about from hints on what is in, on, under,
near etc that thing. At least the first hint must have “There is” or “There are”, e.g.
“There are three eggs in it” for “my refrigerator” or “There aren’t any clothes in it”
for “my sock drawer”.

There is/ There are boasting game

Students work in groups of three or four. Two people take turns boasting about
how good something is, e.g. the (imaginary) hotels that each of them stayed in
while they were on holiday. When they have finished the other student(s) in their
group declare a winner due to a combination of realism and impressiveness of
what they were describing. They are not allowed to repeat the same nouns as the
other person in their statements, but otherwise anything else is okay.

There is/ There are complaints competition

This is the opposite of the game above, meaning students compete to describe
how bad their houses, classrooms, schools etc are while still remaining within the
realms of possibility.

There is/ There are projects

Similar to the two games above, students make up, draw and write descriptions of
good or bad areas, beach resorts, hotels, office buildings, natural environments,
etc. If you don’t mind using tenses in slightly unnatural ways, you can also get them
to draw and describe before and after with pairs of phrases like “There are many
cockroaches” on the before side of the page and “There are butterflies and
dragonflies” on the after page. If you want a competitive element, you can get
students to vote on which is the most or least attractive sounding example, with
completely impossible ones excluded.

There is/ There are hangman

I’m not a huge fan of hangman in the classroom, but at least in this case there is a
relevant language point. Students ask “There is/ are” questions to find out how
many of each letter there are in the word that they are trying to guess, then try to
put them in order to make a word. The questions can be in “Are there any Ps?” or
“How many As are there?” format, or possibly both of those, with the “How
many…?” question only if the first answer is positive