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 […]
Feb 21, 2017 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: endorse Like many of you out there, I suspect, I’m a rather reluctant user of LinkedIn. The site bills itself as “the world’s largest professional network, with hundreds of millions of members” and promises to “connect the world’s professionals … and make them more productive and successful.” However, my experience of using the site suggests it […]
