If you have a heavy workload, it means you have a lot of work to do and you probably work very long hours. Recently, a report revealed that, on average, teachers in the UK work 40-58 hours a week and…
Author Archive
Putting your principles into practice: lexical teaching in the age of eclecticism
Eclectic or just confused? As teachers, we’re often told that we’re now living in a post-method world and that we should all aspire to be principled eclectics, picking and choosing activities and techniques to teach the language. On one level,…
Chunk of the day: get sidetracked
Last year we wrote a book called Perspectives. It's aimed at secondary school students and is loosely based around TED talks – and part of what you have to do for any book you write, but especially for one like…
From student writer to subject authority: a social semiotic approach to EAP
In this post, I shall be proposing that an exploration of the positioning of writers within texts, coupled with an examination into the nature of intertextuality, should be a central focus of any EAP course. Having explored the theoretical grounds…
Word of the day: provincial
This morning, I took my kids down to Gökyüzü, one of the many amazing restaurants near where we live, for a Turkish breakfast. As you may have seen from the featured photo, the portions there are so huge that the…
Word of the day: craic
Over the last few days, I've actually been to Dublin, the capital of Ireland, twice! Last Friday, I also spent a few hours in Galway, on the wild west coast of Ireland, where the winds come whipping in from the…
Word of the day: less
The other day, just as I was slowly waking up and making my first cup of coffee, I heard a discussion on the radio about the whether or not you can say “less than one in five people”. It seemed…
Intermediate word of the day: pride
Pride is that feeling of satisfaction and pleasure that you get when you've done something special, or when someone connected to you has achieved something. We often talk about people taking pride in things. If you take pride in something,…
Word of the day: social mobility
Social mobility is the idea that over their lifetimes or across generations, people from lower-class backgrounds can move to a higher social class. An example of this would be my father, who grew up in relative poverty in Liverpool before…
Word of the day: cowboy
If, like many foreign students, the main image that comes into your head when you think of cowboys involves men in big hats and long boots, riding horses and heading off into the sunset somewhere in America, then you may…