If that’s what it’s not, what is it? My post about the Beginner syllabus and short answers with auxiliaries has produced quite a few responses o social media - both positive and negative. On the whole, I'm happy to receive…
Why don’t we teach more grammatical chunks at low levels?
One of the curiosities of the dominant grammar syllabus at low levels is that certain 'higher-level' grammar does occasionally creep through as words or chunks, while other patterns are apparently still not allowed to. Would you like some more chunks?…
Grammar curiosities (and some nonsense) 9: the present continuous
It is curious how grammar is sometimes divided up. For example, while most teachers nowadays are quite happy to section off Would you like … as some kind of lexico-grammatical structure that can be taught to beginners, the low-level syllabus…
Grammar nonsense (and some curiosities) 8: short answers and auxiliaries
Following on from the previous post about the way the syllabus in most Beginner-level books is constructed, one of the areas that continues to dominate at this level – and which I find most annoying - is the teaching of…
Translation: Tackling the Taboo part 2
In the first post on tackling the taboo that surrounds using any form of translation in the language classroom, I unpacked my own slow conversion, considered the roots of the English-only dogma, and explored why such positions were unsustainable. Today…
Translation: tackling the taboo
As a native speaker teacher working in a multi-lingual teaching context in the UK, I am perhaps an unlikely convert to the cause of translation in language teaching, and it's been a long and winding road that's brought me here.…
Grammar nonsense 6: future forms
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that EFL students attending a class must be in want of a good grammar explanation. However little known the feelings or views of such students may be on their first entering a classroom, this…
Complicating the coursebook debate part 3: coursebook use
Today's post follows on from another recent post that looked at some of the so-called false assumptions that supposedly lie at the heart of coursebooks. The assumptions, as stated in a recent piece by Geoff Jordan, are that all coursebooks…
Complicating the coursebook debate part 2: can’t we just be friends?
This week I thought I would take a break from the grammar series (to be continued!) and pick up on the discussion of coursebooks that Hugh started some time ago with the somewhat optimistically titled Complicating the coursebook debate part…
Grammar nonsense 4: relative clauses
This is less a post about the craziness of description and more one about the way grammar is presented and the expectation that grammar should always be practised – and practised in particular ways. Grammar McNuggets and overprotectiveness Scott Thornbury has…