Jan 14, 2015 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: What’re you doing later? Lots of very common chunks don’t get taught early enough in many course because they are seen as somehow being examples of ‘advanced’ grammar. For instance, this common question is often left out of Elementary and Pre-Intermediate courses due to the fact that it’s the present continuous with future reference. To us, this seems crazy […]
Dec 22, 2014 Core Principles, Resources 1 Lexis is more important than grammar Absolutely central to lexical teaching is a view of language. A starting point on the road towards understanding this view is the commonly stated observation that without grammar you can say little, but without vocabulary you can say nothing. Take the following sequence of words. What do you think is being communicated? want see film […]
Dec 1, 2014 Exploiting Exercises, Resources Patterns beyond the past simple The following grammar exercise on the past simple is from our book Outcomes Elementary (National Geographic Learning). Students complete the sentences with the correct past simple form of verbs given in brackets at the end of sentences – resulting in the following. 1 I had lunch with my parents. 2 I went to the beach […]
Nov 6, 2014 Chunk of the day, Chunks Chunk of the day: Just because . . . it doesn’t mean We’ve both often had students act more than a little surprised at our apparently un-English ways. Smiling and being friendly is often enough to start the questions about whether we’re not secretly from somewhere ‘abroad’. This particular chunk helps offer a good answer – and is also great for students themselves. Just because I’m Brazilian […]
Nov 5, 2014 Opinions, Vocabulary Choice Why teachers shouldn’t prefer blonde I recently asked a couple of colleagues which word they thought was more frequent – arise or blonde. Almost immediately, the answer blonde came back. However, despite the confidence of the response, according to the British National Corpus (BNC) and various dictionaries, my colleagues were wrong! Arise is in fact nine times more frequent than […]
