Mar 25, 2025 Chunks, Developing materials, Lexis, Vocabulary Choice Collocations: using collocation dictionaries and AI When choosing collocations to teach, I often used references like Oxford Collocations . Now AI offers help, but is it any better? And are collocations actually what we should search for?In recent times I have done less of this kind of searching for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I tend to do this more when […]
Jan 6, 2025 Chunk of the day, Chunks, Lexis Boat Idioms There are a lot of boat idioms in English perhaps as a result of the history and geography of UK itself. The United Kingdom has almost 8000 miles of coastline and a long history as a seafaring nation, so it’s no surprise that many words and phrases that were originally used on boats and at […]
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 […]
Dec 6, 2023 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: Harry Pottered out I spent last Friday and Saturday in Bologna, Italy, where I was talking at an excellent conference for English-language teachers. In one of the talks that I saw, a teacher was describing a one-week summer school course for kids that she’d helped organise. The week had been based around the Harry Potter books, so kids had made their own costumes, acted […]
Dec 5, 2023 Chunk of the day, Chunks From a trickle to a flood: water metaphors and their emotional pull One of the most depressing things about British politics right now – and trust me, there are plenty of things to get depressed about – is the fact that there aren’t really any mainstream politicians who’re willing to be honest about the fact that the country needs immigrants . . . and that without significant […]
