According to some recent research I read, the number of divorces in the UK last year was highest among men and women aged 40 to 44. I mention this because this afternoon, I had one of those depressing kinds of…
Author Archive
Translation: Tackling the Taboo part 2
In the first post on tackling the taboo that surrounds using any form of translation in the language classroom, I unpacked my own slow conversion, considered the roots of the English-only dogma, and explored why such positions were unsustainable. Today…
Translation: tackling the taboo
As a native speaker teacher working in a multi-lingual teaching context in the UK, I am perhaps an unlikely convert to the cause of translation in language teaching, and it's been a long and winding road that's brought me here.…
Word of the day: nippy
After an Indian summer - a period of warm weather in autumn, a time when it's usually pretty cold - that seemed to last for ever, London has suddenly turned really cold. Over the last few days, temperatures have plummeted and at…
Phrase of the day: When I win the lottery
Almost everyone who has learned English in class has probably had that lesson where you study second conditionals. In a second conditional, we use a past tense to describe an imagined, unlikely or impossible situation and would to describe the result…
Word of the day: schlep
In a recent post on the word pogrom, we looked at language connected to the dark human tendency to blame and attack others when things start going wrong in society. We mentioned the anti-Jewish pogroms that occurred across Eastern Europe…
Word of the day: pogrom
Recently, in a break from the norm, the Guardian newspaper here ran a whole series of features on the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, a megalopolis which is now nearing 30 million people! Jakarta's a city I know pretty well as…
Word of the day: march
A march is when a large group of people walk down the streets protesting against something – or in support of something – or as a show of strength. You can go on a march or join a march. So…
Word of the day: the all-clear
As anyone who has ever watched a loved one fight against it will know, cancer is a truly horrible disease. It affects both patients and their families in such a traumatic way that no-one will ever be able to look…
Chunk of the day: dark horse
A week or so ago, I gave a talk at a conference for English language teachers in Liestal, in the north of Switzerland. While I was there, I bumped into an old friend of mine that I hadn't seen each…