Feb 27, 2015 Grammar, Opinions Yet more thoughts on teaching grammar I’m now four weeks into the Focus on Grammar course I’m teaching at International House, London, which means only two more weeks to go. It’s been a strange and mostly fairly lovely experience, made much easier by having some really great students. It’s also been a course that has provoked two posts already – here […]
Feb 23, 2015 Chunk of the day, Chunks Chunk of the day: the bottom line (revisited) As with single words, we should look for opportunities to revise or recycle chunks. When we do so, it’s good to move beyond simply matching the word or chunk to the same meaning we gave last time. We can explore new collocations and contexts, which may drift into related, but ‘new’ meanings . A great example is […]
Feb 23, 2015 Opinions, Vocabulary Choice ELT: In need of family therapy? In my previous blogging incarnation on the CELT training site, I wrote about why lexical sets may be popular and about some of the downsides to them. That blog was closed when I left University of Westminster and I have since had a couple of requests to repost things. The first post – Why English […]
Feb 20, 2015 Chunk of the day, Chunks Chunk of the day: the bottom line In class yesterday, we looked at some vocabulary for describing different roles and duties people have at work. Students then went on to discuss which they had themselves, how good they felt they were at them – and which other ones they might be good / bad at. In the midst of this conversation, one […]
Feb 20, 2015 Core Principles 3 Language is norm orientated This use of the word norms here is inspired by Patrick Hanks’ recent book, Norms and Exploitations. It’s just the latest in a large number of articles, books and theories which have tried to account for the fact that despite an infinite number of possible sentences based on a limited set of innate grammar rules […]
