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 […]
Feb 27, 2015 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: would’ve thought Last Wednesday evening, I took a train from Preston back home to London. As we were nearing Euston station, I left my seat and went to wait near the door. A mother and her teenage daughter were already there, and the girl was messing about, pretending to open the door – in order to get […]
Feb 27, 2015 Grammar, Opinions Yet more thoughts on teaching grammar I’m now four weeks into the Focus on Grammar course I’m teaching at International House, London, which means only two more weeks to go. It’s been a strange and mostly fairly lovely experience, made much easier by having some really great students. It’s also been a course that has provoked two posts already – here […]
Feb 23, 2015 Chunk of the day, Chunks Chunk of the day: the bottom line (revisited) As with single words, we should look for opportunities to revise or recycle chunks. When we do so, it’s good to move beyond simply matching the word or chunk to the same meaning we gave last time. We can explore new collocations and contexts, which may drift into related, but ‘new’ meanings . A great example is […]
Feb 23, 2015 Opinions, Vocabulary Choice ELT: In need of family therapy? In my previous blogging incarnation on the CELT training site, I wrote about why lexical sets may be popular and about some of the downsides to them. That blog was closed when I left University of Westminster and I have since had a couple of requests to repost things. The first post – Why English […]
