What are the correct rules of English grammar? Who says we can’t split infinitives? Michael Rundell, Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan Dictionary, argues that we should expect linguistic rules to be bent and broken over time. He will be presenting on this topic at a British Council seminar, live-streamed from Cardiff on Tuesday, 3 June. Adult native speakers of a language rarely, if ever, make grammatical mistakes. This might sound like an outlandish claim, but the counter-argument — that bad grammar is endemic — rests on two common misunderstandings. The first arises because of confusion about what the category ‘grammar’ includes.
The second relates to different interpretations of the word ‘rule’, and what we mean when we talk about ‘the rules of a language’. We will come to this in a moment. The reason this is worth discussing is that people in the English-speaking world (and for all I know, in other cultures too) are regularly lectured by self-appointed experts telling them how bad their grammar is. Or so we thought.
Business English bonanza. Oxford University Press | English Language Teaching Global Blog. At this year’s ELTJ Debate, Janet Enever (Umea University, Sweden) argued against the motion that ‘This house believes that Primary ELT does more harm than good‘. Janet shares her thoughts on some of the points that came out of the debate. You can watch the full recording of the debate on the IATEFL Online website, or catch up on the highlights in our Storify story of the event.
Firstly, I’d like to say how pleased I was to hear so many interesting and relevant points raised at the ELTJ Debate. Together, they provided fruit for a really valuable round table event – perhaps this would be a more productive format for developing shared understandings and creating networks than the adversarial stance of a debate. Here, I’d like to pick up on a few points raised that I felt were particularly important – just to start the ball rolling for additional perspectives to be aired. There’s proof in the pudding Firstly then, the exciting new evidence from Eva Wilden in Germany! Political buy-in.
BBC Learning English | For Teachers | Handy guide. What You Can Do With Newspapers: 11 Surprisingly Engaging Activities. Trinity College London | Home. Authentic communicative skills for real life GESE exams are for people of all ages who want to develop communicative English language speaking and listening skills for use in real life - whatever the purpose, whether for immigration, work, study, leisure or employment. Genuine discussion format GESE exams are one-to-one, face-to-face assessments of English language speaking and listening skills with a Trinity examiner, who encourages the candidate to show what they can do through prompts and authentic interative dialogue.
The exam length is 5-25 minutes depending on the grade. Focus on building confidence Because candidates can plan ahead to discuss their own interests and opinions in the exam, this motivates learning and aids natural speech - which helps them to relax and perform at their best during the exam. Mapped to the CEFR GESE is available at 12 levels: Grades 1-12 (pre-A1-C2 CEFR levels). Grades 1-3 - Initital stage - Pre-A1-A2.1 Grades 4-6 - Elementary stage - A2.2-B1.2 Book exams. Free English Exercises | Free Online Lessons in English Grammar, Vocabulary and Phrases.
IT related. Move over, Foster: here are the actual Brits who built the modern world | Art and design. You see it in hospitals and offices, airports and schools. It is the go-to architectural language for service stations and retail parks, data centres and storage sheds. The ubiquitous acreage of grey cladding panels, offset with struts and wires and pointless bits of rigging, windows enlivened with grids of louvres, rooftops adorned with inflatable pillows.
If you’re lucky, you might even get a swooping tensile canopy strapped on to the entrance, bringing a touch of yachty glamour to the grim shed beyond. The scourge of our cities and out-of-town centres, this wretched language of Portakabin-moderne has become the default setting for countless developers and local authorities, bereft of budget and ambition. With its modular, prefab look, it bestows buildings with the deceptive impression of temporariness, masking the sorry truth that these flimsy boxes will long outstay their welcome. So it might come as some surprise that this dreary style has a noble ancestry. Neave Brown James Gowan.
Dictation. Financial Literacy Resources : KQED Education | KQED Public Media for Northern CA. Fostering Financial Literacy in ESL Classrooms Using New Media Tools In these lessons students learn about managing money, banking, credit, debt, home financing and loans while practicing listening, reading, speaking and writing skills. By integrating new media tools into the curriculum we hope educators will be able to engage ESL learners by making unfamiliar financial concepts as concrete as possible. Educators – How to Use This Site Target group – from high beginning to low intermediate adult English language learners, in particular low-income, recent-arrival immigrants and refugees, to high-intermediate and advanced ESL students in academic-credit classes – these lessons could be adapted for noncredit and lower-level students.
Four steps Students Tell us what you think — fill out our surveys at the end of the lessons or activities. Six Lesson Plans 1. Lesson PlanFinancial Literacy Unit (PDF) New Media Tool to use in the lessonBudget Builder Calculator Take the Teacher Survey 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Interview preparation. John Ramsay's Learning and Grade Improvement Techniques Web Site. John Ramsay's Learning and Grade Improvement Techniques Web Site Site contents (sorted alphabetically by title): Dead link warning Some of the links on this site take you to pages in a variety of locations around the world. I have no control over them. The average life span of sites on the Web is around 45 days. John Ramsay Links to John Ramsay's other sites back to the top of the page Further Reading Recommended Readings for Writing, Reasoning, Researching and Learning - (J.
Writing techniques Referencing skills Adding non-electronic quotations and references to your written work - (J. How to make an entry in a reference list (J. How to write business reports If you are unsure about the details of business report writing, you may like to invest in Morton, G., Effective Business Writing: Principles and Applications, Harcourt Brace, Orlando, 1996 Review: This text is American, consequently some of the language used has to be translated back into English.
Critical writing Critical Thinking Surf's up. The gateleaper: how to get in to London's private members' clubs - London Life - Life & Style. To get a membership one must be vetted by the previous class of occupiers and transfer a joining fee of £2,000 and an annual subscription fee of £1,500 (Dover Street Arts Club prices). But there’s no point in being a member of just one club — you want to be admitted to all of them.
Unlike swanky parties, where it’s easy to bluff the guest list by mentioning someone else’s name from Twitter, members’ clubs require a membership card. And a dress code. Plus a willingness to constantly nod and bow. With the cost of living crisis and youth unemployment on the rise, creeping into members’ clubs is practically the only way for youngsters to get ahead in life, quickly, without fees. I’ve tried all these methods with unlimited success. 1. 89 Pall Mall, SW1, founded 1897 The only club with a huge swimming pool, spa, Turkish bath, post office and florist. To bypass this hurdle politely tell the waiters that your member friend is playing squash downstairs. 2. 40 Dover Street, W1, founded 1863 3. 4.
Punctuation. Look Into My Eyes...and Learn Unforgettable Vocabulary! Sometimes, you get lucky. A planned activity that you hope will be moderately interesting and instructive turns into a runaway success. Here’s one: Inspired by a recent article in the New York Times that reported that reading Chekhov was the best way to learn to interpret other people’s body language, I was lured into taking the Times’ online quiz to see how good I was at reading visual cues.
As it turned out, I had inadvertently latched onto what became a wildly popular vocabulary and speaking activity. I started by putting students in groups of four and announcing that we were going to have a pop vocabulary quiz. “Please number a piece of paper from 1 to 10, with one paper per group,” I told them. Under each of more than 30 photos of different people’s eyes, the Times listed four different adjectives. Needless to say, the first challenge for the IEP students in my advanced Speaking & Listening class was to understand the adjectives attached to each photo. Years' or Year's or Years. Inspired by the Summer Olympics, I led the "Punctuation Games" for a client yesterday. The sophisticated group took away gold, silver, and bronze medals for their wins in "100-Word Hyphen," "Apostrophe Toss," "Error-Ringing," and a final relay race in which they inserted commas, semicolons, hyphens, and apostrophes.
Apostrophe Toss raised the most questions. Here's one controversial sentence involving the use of the apostrophe: The position requires at least five years experience in web site development. The sentence needed to be tossed into the "s apostrophe" basket because the correct rendering is "five years' experience. " But why use the apostrophe? Examples: The opinion of the group is the group's opinion.The reputation of the man is the man's reputation.The rivalry of the teams is the teams' rivalry.The pay of a week is a week's pay.The sabbatical of a year is a year's sabbatical.The experience of five years is five years' experience. He is owed a week of pay. Apostrophe Help Please! How London Are You? Newsletter. In this edition – it's all about authenticity We often go to great lengths to bring the real world into the classroom, lugging around CD players, holiday brochures and even potted palm trees – but do these things really help to make the learning experience more authentic?
Should we use real-life articles, stick to specially-written material or use fewer materials altogether? Do audio recordings really help our students listen more effectively? Is technology a useful tool or does it get in the way of face-to-face communication? The writers in this issue discuss some of the dilemmas that we've all faced. 2009 – the year of Twitter It's been an interesting year in our profession, particularly on my side of things – technology for teaching and training. This has led to all sorts of people joining the online conversation, and these days you're just as likely to rub shoulders with one of the elite luminaries such as Jeremy Harmer or Scott Thornbury as with one of your own students.
Dictation NEW! 3 Ways to Make Reading Lessons More Interactive. How do you deal with reading lessons in your ESL classroom? Do you have your students read silently in class? Do you assign the reading for homework? Many of the ESL-Library lessons have a reading component to them. How can teachers make reading lessons more interactive, communicative, and fun? This method incorporates many skills: reading, listening, speaking, vocabulary, and writing. First, assign a paragraph of the reading to each student. Many of the ESL-Library lessons are formatted in short paragraphs that are ideal for using this method (for example, in Famous People, Famous Places, Famous Things, Holidays, etc.). This works best for short readings or dialogues. Divide students into small groups or pairs.Hand out a cut-up version of the story or dialogue.Have students try to arrange the sentences in order.
ESL-Library has a whole section with dialogues that are all ready to cut up! This technique easily turns a reading exercise into a listening exercise for a bit of variety. Agreement and Disagreement. Agreement, disagreement and ... the English soulBy Olga Mindrul, Moscow State UniversityThe way people agree or disagree in an argument or discussion varies in different languages. A lot here depends on the national cultural and traditional background of the speaker. The English are not as straightforward in expressing their opinion as Russians are, for example. The word which describes the English way of speaking and behaving in the best way is probably the word “reserved”. If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll find a sentence that says it all: “An Englishman is very reserved, quiet, always discreet” (COLLINS COBUILD ENGLISH LANGUAGE DICTIONARY).
George Mikes in “How to be an Alien” wrote in a humorous way about these typical features of the English, which are reflected in the use of the language: “The English have no soul, they have understatement instead”. His speech was boring / Yes, I am afraid it was.I have to agree that it was.\ I must say I found it so. Partial agreement. Business English -- Agreeing and Disagreeing - SF ESL Group (San Francisco , CA. ESL Teacher Resource for Business Lesson Plans. Email English Worksheets | Macmillan Business. Get more out of teaching with Email English with these free downloadable resources. In these website activities you will find free writing practice for most Email English units.
You can print out the page for the unit you are working on and give it directly to the students. No additional preparation will be necessary. Alternatively, you may want to prepare a transparency for an overhead projector. 1. Write two emails: the first asking for information; the second asking for action. 7. Is public speaking really that scary? | Comment is free | The Observer. Tom Lamont, Observer writer I wasn't so surprised, last week, to read the results of a poll revealing that people feared public speaking more than they feared being buried alive. Sure, I thought. Because being buried alive at least would be private.
No audience to watch you writhe. Jerry Seinfeld once defined people like me, neatly, as those who would be "better off in the casket than doing the eulogy" and I was touched that (according to OnePoll's findings) more than half of us feel this way. Yes, public speaking is "really that scary" if you consider the forced attention of a crowd a punishment and not a prize. I can't have been the only one to shiver when Lauren Laverne – a pro! Everyone's fears are personal, particular and (I suspect) quietly cherished. At that age my stated fear was sharks, and public speaking was easy. Viv Groskop, journalist, writer and comedian You mean you couldn't even get it together to give a speech at your own wedding? Funny you should mention sharks. Why Do Teachers Quit? - Liz Riggs. Richard Ingersoll taught high-school social studies and algebra in both public and private schools for nearly six years before leaving the profession and getting a Ph.D. in sociology.
Now a professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s education school, he’s spent his career in higher ed searching for answers to one of teaching’s most significant problems: teacher turnover. Teaching, Ingersoll says, “was originally built as this temporary line of work for women before they got their real job—which was raising families, or temporary for men until they moved out of the classroom and became administrators.
That was sort of the historical set-up.” Ingersoll extrapolated and then later confirmed that anywhere between 40 and 50 percent of teachers will leave the classroom within their first five years (that includes the nine and a half percent that leave before the end of their first year.) “One of the big reasons I quit was sort of intangible,” Ingersoll says. Style: Johnson: When is a rule not a rule? English for Architects worksheets/ activities. Conversation Skills – Giving your opinion. 'First world problems' revealed in study. CAELA: ESL Resources: Briefs. How to Do a Comprehensive Review of Verb Tenses for Intermediate ESL Students.
Verb Talk: Conversation Activities to Practice Using Verb Tenses. How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses | Wired Business. Why the Japanese still love music CDs - Video - Business News. Let's All Be Connected Educators. That’s Correct! 7 Great Ways to Check Answers with Your ESL Class.
Grammar goodness. Vocabulary magic. Stop, think and then teach! Delicious Writing Activities: Using Food in the Classroom. MultiBrief: Empowering connected learning in TESOL. American English Speech. International professional development | Teacher Network. October 2013. 4 great things to do with newspapers in the language classroom. Test Yourself | E.L.L. Practice, Oct. 7, 2013. Bogota Business English Conversation Club Preview for October 10th: COCKTAILS | Hey Bogota.
ESL Writing. CAELA: ESL Resources: Digests. Williams - Providing Feedback on ESL Students' Written Assignments. American English | A Website for Teachers and Learners of English As a Foreign Language Abroad. Learning English. American English | A Website for Teachers and Learners of English As a Foreign Language Abroad.
English Vocabulary for Business :: Video Vocab | Learn Business English Vocabulary for ESL. Esl movies. Untitled. I Know Why Your Students Don't Speak English… And What to Do About It. Blogs on English-Language Learners. October 2013. LookWiser - Presentations - Pronunciation Secrets for Non-native English Speakers. The Learning Network - The Learning Network Blog - NYTimes.com. Toward a More Productive Conversation About Homework - Richard Walker.