Jan 17, 2019 Classroom Activities, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions 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 I’d like to move on to more practical matters and simply share seven activities that […]
Dec 23, 2018 Classroom Activities, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions, Revision, Teaching lexically, The state of our profession Translation in language classes: tackling the taboo Translation is a fantastic tool for all language teachers to use in their classes. That might be a surprising statement from a native speaker teacher working in a multi-lingual teaching context in the UK. and to be honest it’s been a long and winding road that brought me to that view. Let me take you […]
Dec 3, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day 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 night it’s regularly dropping below zero out there. It’s so cold that there’s a dusting […]
Nov 12, 2018 Chunks, Phrase of the day 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 or subsequent action that follows on from this imagined situation. And quite probably, the example […]
Nov 6, 2018 Chunks, Word of the day 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 and that by the end of the 19th century led to tens of thousands of […]
