Nov 14, 2024 Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Exploiting Exercises, Pronunciation Dictation and decoding A long time ago I did a Diploma in TEFL and I remember a particular piece of feedback I was given after one of my observed lessons. In this lesson, I’d dictated a series of words to the students. Now, I can’t remember exactly what those words were or why I was dictating them, but […]
Aug 29, 2024 Grammar, Grammar bugbears and curiosities, Uncategorized GRAMMAR NONSENSE & CURIOSITIES: can It may seem a bit strange to include can under the umbrella of grammar nonsense. I’m sure few of you have considered the rules for its usage as wrong or find the way it’s presented particularly weird – and n the whole, I’d agree with you! I include it in our ongoing series of ELT shame and […]
Feb 1, 2024 Opinions Aiming for average An amazing feat, but that’s all I recently watched Nyad – a new film about the super-endurance swimmer Diane Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida. I like these kinds of stories, and the achievements they depict are often pretty amazing – but I’m turned off if they are presented as models of how to […]
Jan 19, 2024 Opinions Back in class: thoughts from learning and teaching languages at low levels During the eighteen months of writing the new edition of Outcomes I put my teaching and language learning efforts on hold. Back in January 2022, when we started the project, I was teaching a beginner Spanish class and learning Russian, but it quickly became clear that my addled brain was not going to do multi-tasking […]
Dec 20, 2023 Chunk of the day, Chunks More fictional characters who appear in everyday English After the positive reception that my last post on literary figures in everyday speech got, I figured it made sense to write a follow-up exploring the way the names of some more fictional characters are used in daily conversation. Today, we’ll look at five famous characters and consider how they’ve passed into the language. First […]
