Feb 28, 2017 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: baby boomers Over 400,000 British people people died during the Second World War, the vast majority of them men. Now, while this pales into insignificance when compared to the tens of millions who died in the Soviet Union, it still led to a serious lack of manpower in the immediate aftermath of the war. This had several […]
Feb 27, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: in a home The initial spark for this word of the day came from a discussion we had with a user of our coursebook series, Outcomes, about our (lack of) focus on articles (a, an, the – or nothing) before nouns. My first thought was that most of the time the correct use of articles has little or […]
Feb 26, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: get the hang of Yesterday morning, I took my four-year-old son trampolining. It was the first time he’d ever been and even though he was very clearly having a whale of a time bouncing around, it was also pretty clear from the rather clueless way he was throwing himself around that he wasn’t exactly a seasoned professional! When the […]
Feb 23, 2017 Grammar, Opinions Grammar curiosities 1: reported speech The first post in our series on grammar nonsense got quite a lot of discussion going and it seemed that on the whole there was quite a lot of sympathy with the view that many of the ‘rules’ about reported speech that are commonly taught are what we technically term guff! There were some dissenting […]
Feb 22, 2017 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: can’t get the staff! We’ve had quite a hectic week this week. We’re putting the finishing touches to a high school book we’ve been working on; we’ve been catching up with our email backlog; and on Monday we were inspected as part of our bid to get official accreditation for our summer school programme. Now, official accreditation is crucially […]
