Mar 1, 2021 Chunk of the day, Chunks Chunk of the day: Needs must After class yesterday, I popped out to grab a bite to eat from one of the little cafés near where I live. As I was walking back, I bumped into an old friend of mine who I hadn’t seen for ages. We got talking and she told me that after ten years here in London […]
Mar 1, 2021 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Opinions, Pronunciation, Twenty things in twenty years Twenty things in twenty years part ten: the main point of focusing on pronunciation in class isn’t to improve pronunciation! Pronunciation is quite possibly the most neglected area of language teaching that there is. In many of the classes I’ve observed over the years, I’ve seen little or no attempt to work on pronunciation and where it IS focused on, it’s often instinctive attempts at correcting mispronounced discrete phonemes of the kind we’re all so […]
Jan 22, 2021 Classroom Activities, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Nine: the vast majority of mistakes really aren’t to do with grammar! The world used to be so tidy. Back in the misty morning of my youth, I seriously did naively believe that the root cause of student error was essentially grammatical. If only students could somehow have the ‘rules’ for the use of specific grammatical structures drilled into their heads through repeated mini-lectures, homeworks, pages of […]
Nov 26, 2020 Grammar, Opinions, The state of our profession Five more things I’ve learned from running the ENGLISH QUESTIONS ANSWERED group Two years ago now, I set up a Facebook group called ENGLISH QUESTIONS ANSWERED. In a sense, it was a purely selfish move as I wanted to be able to shepherd into one place all the questions about language that I regularly got asked across a wide range of platforms. Looking around at the many […]
Nov 11, 2020 Chunks, Phrase of the day What’s in a name? Almost as soon as I started teaching, I realised that there were plenty of countries out there that took names a bit more seriously than we do here in England. When meeting new classes, I’d often be told things like “I’m Haruko. My name means spring child“, or “My name’s Hakim, which means wise in […]
