Mar 19, 2015 Opinions, The state of our profession When less is more: freeing students from the burden of choice There’s a reason why Starbucks will never catch on it Italy. Go to any branch of the global chain and try ordering a cappuccino and you’ll be met with a barrage of questions: What size do you want? Do you want any extra flavours added? An extra shot perhaps? Hot or iced? Made with any […]
Mar 16, 2015 Classroom Activities, Opinions Two-way translation in the multilingual classroom I’m just back from Turkey, where I delivered a one-day workshop on teaching grammar through International House in Izmir. One issue that arose, as it often does with nonnatives, is whether or not translation should be allowed. My own belief has long been that it should not only be allowed, but actively encouraged – and […]
Mar 13, 2015 Grammar, Opinions Thoughts on teaching grammar: part four I finished teaching the Focus On Grammar course I’d been doing one evening a week at IH London last night. Like most teachers, I always hate that moment of goodbye at the end of a course, as you know you may well never again see the lovely people you’ve developed a relationship with. Despite that, […]
Mar 9, 2015 Opinions, Vocabulary Choice If you ask me … the problem with opening gambits Many moons ago, I enjoyed a brief and intense love affair with a book by Eric Keller and Sylvia Warner called Conversation Gambits. First published by LTP back in 1988, I came to it in the mid-1990s and at the time it was something of a revelation, containing as it did a whole host of […]
Mar 9, 2015 Core Principles, Resources 4 Language is patterned We have already see that one problem with the grammar + words view of language is that words are difficult to define, but the same could equally said of grammar on its own. In the case of Pinker’s book, Words and Rules, grammar is very narrowly defined as basically the rules of morphology (adding -ed […]
