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 […]
Mar 8, 2015 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: on the way I went to visit my parents yesterday and on the way there, I was thinking about the number of times I’ve done that journey up and down the motorway and imagined all the little ant trails that I have left – my journeys from home to school, from home to work, from home to where […]
Mar 5, 2015 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: It’s alright for some! This week, a friend of mine in France sent me a message via Facebook asking if I’d got a copy of a new box set that collects together all the LPs by The Pretty Things, one of my very favourite bands of all time. I replied that I’d managed to grab a free one from […]
Mar 3, 2015 Lexis, Opinions Phrasal verbs: myths and realities Last year I was lucky enough to attend the PASE conference in Warsaw, where I saw a locally based teacher, Jonathan Marks, give a thought-provoking talk on phrasal verbs. Having long believed that this is one area of the language that’s incredibly badly presented in most coursebooks, and that subsequently is often poorly handled in […]
