Jun 23, 2025 Chunk of the day, Chunks, Lexis More sailing idioms This is the second in a short series of posts looking at sailing idioms and idioms connected to the UK’s long history as a maritime nation. It’s a reflection of the way in which our 8000-mile coastline has shaped the language and the way we process the world – and by the way, you can […]
May 29, 2025 Chunks, Core Principles, Revision Word-for-word translation: an activity with possibilities Generally speaking, teachers discourage word-for-word translation from a students own language into the language they are learning. Sometimes they discourage it for the wrong reason – that translation or the use of L1 is just wrong. Sometimes teachers discourage it because they know it’ll end up in gobbledygook and they teach students that the correct […]
May 7, 2025 Beginners & Low levels, Chunks, Exploiting Exercises, Lexis, Revision, Teaching lexically Rereading texts to revise language at low levels Rereading texts to revise language can be good because we access language outside the selection in exercises labelled vocabulary or grammar. Whether you have treated the listening or reading text as purely developing skills or not, there is good reason to revisit texts to focus on language – especially when we want to revise content […]
Mar 25, 2025 Chunks, Developing materials, Lexis, Vocabulary Choice Collocations: using collocation dictionaries and AI When choosing collocations to teach, I often used references like Oxford Collocations . Now AI offers help, but is it any better? And are collocations actually what we should search for?In recent times I have done less of this kind of searching for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I tend to do this more when […]
Jan 6, 2025 Chunk of the day, Chunks, Lexis Boat Idioms There are a lot of boat idioms in English perhaps as a result of the history and geography of UK itself. The United Kingdom has almost 8000 miles of coastline and a long history as a seafaring nation, so it’s no surprise that many words and phrases that were originally used on boats and at […]
