Feb 12, 2015 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: It’s not as though I had two conversations last night which featured this chunk. The first one was with a friend who was moaning about a culture clash in the Paris office he often visits. Leaving his house at 5.30 in the morning to arrive in Paris at 10, he often finds the office still half empty. Then when […]
Feb 11, 2015 Grammar, Opinions Some reflections on the universal panacea Last week I started teaching a six-week evening course at International House, London. For someone with such a keen interest in lexically-oriented teaching, the decision to go for the Focus on Grammar option may seem perverse, but I’ve long maintained that learning to look at language from a lexical point of view has made me […]
Feb 10, 2015 Core Principles, Resources 2 Words are difficult to define We recently had an email about the text on one part of our website, where this question was asked – “Should it be language is the building blocks or language is the building block?” It’s a good question to lead into this post. It’d be a bit strange to say building block as not much […]
Feb 4, 2015 Chunk of the day, Chunks Chunk of the day: Where’s the best place to …? This weekend sees the big match in north London between Arsenal and Tottenham. Among discussions about who has the best chance of winning and what the managers’ best teams are, there’s the more serious discussion of Where’s’s the best place to see the game? Our place of choice is The Beaconsfield, a lovely Victorian pub […]
Jan 30, 2015 Chunks, Word of the day Word of the day: pop One of the best things about adopting a more lexical view of language is that you start to appreciate more clearly how words interact with other words, and you are then able to start passing on to students the message that “these words often go together”. It also means you lose many of the worries […]
