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 […]
Nov 10, 2023 Lexis, Opinions One is most bemused: hedging and the strange function of ‘one’ The original idea for this blog post came one afternoon when my wife saw my response to an email we’d both received from the school our son goes to. His new form tutor had written to us saying how well he was settling in and suggesting that he was a credit to us and that […]
Sep 24, 2021 Classroom Activities, Lexis, Opinions Using texts to develop lexical awareness In this guest post, Patrick Gallagher outlines how he uses the WORD / CHUNK OF THE DAY sections of this website with his students. We hope it’ll give you some ideas for how you could explore and exploit these texts yourself. Over to Patrick.In order to improve their English, students need exposure to lexically-rich input. […]
Sep 2, 2021 Classroom Activities, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions Back to school Part Five: challenges and homework As if to prove the point about procrastination and failing to do stuff outside class that I made in my last post reflecting on my own language learning experiences, I’m almost ashamed to begin by admitting it has been over a year since I wrote these words: ‘I”ll talk a bit more about my approach […]
