English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

12 Awesome Language Resources for the Word Nerd I’m an unabashed word nerd. I majored in English and have been a high school English teacher for almost 30 years. I run an online program helping homeschoolers develop writing skills, and I manage this wordy blog and a wordy Facebook page. I have become, over the years, something of an expert on grammar and usage, but it’s not due to any particular cleverness on my part. I have simply learned how to ask good questions and find reliable answers. it's NOT about what the teacher does with technology Bruce Springsteen: "When we kiss…" Not just going through the motions! You could probably say I've had four different though overlapping careers — in language teaching, language teacher training, technology and ELT management. The first of those I retired from (after 35+ years) a few months ago, though the number of contact hours I was doing was limited; teacher training I'm retiring from at the end of this month; management I got fired from (to the relief of all involved!) many years ago; which leaves only another 10 or so years in technology to do (I'm only (?) 57, so it ain't over yet!). I happened to mentioned this in a session a couple of weeks ago and someone (Mati?)

11 Drawings to Remember English Rules Forever Have you ever had a problem that you just couldn’t solve for ages? Then suddenly someone says one word, or just shows you one simple picture, and you get that “aha” moment — you suddenly understand everything? Well, over the many, many years I’ve been teaching English, I’ve found that some simple images can help explain rules in English that cause so many problems for people. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too. So here are some of my most effective little pictures to help you remember English rules. theconversation If you struggle to understand the teenagers and young people around you when they call their schoolfriend a durkboi and try to cadge some peas, you are not alone. The idea that they are communicating in a different language from their parents has been the subject of excited chatter on parenting websites and among some researchers. A defining characteristic of youth slang is thought to be its faddishness – the fact that terms have a rapid turnover, quickly coming in and out of fashion and then disappearing before parents and teachers have time to decode them.

Links for translators The resources on this page are all available free (or in free versions) on the Internet. General Dictionaries Cambridge The suite of Cambridge dictionaries are possibly the best online English-English dictionaries available (and with nearly 2m searches a month, among the most popular). Present simple and present continuous Examples I play tennis every Sunday. I’m playing hockey now. She eats fruit every day. Placeholder names in English and other languages  If you follow politics, you will have noticed that politicians often invoke the cliché of the ‘man in the street’. You may have heard them referring to the average Joe, Joe Bloggs, John Public, Joe Sixpack, etc. when talking to an audience, addressing everyone and no one, rather than someone in particular. The English language has several of those placeholder names and, more often than not, they denote a male person – implying that the average person is a man, the everyman.

English teachers, are you asking the right questions? Declan Cooley, CELTA Opens in a new tab or window. trainer at the British Council in Poland, explains why some questions are not as effective as they first appear, and offers some alternatives. Questions of all kinds are a teacher's most basic tools for generating interest, provoking thoughts, encouraging students to speak, developing text comprehension skills and checking understanding. New teachers on courses like the CELTA spend a lot of time honing their skills at using effective questions in the classroom. Regular Verbs in the Past Tense – Running Dictation – The Canswedian English Teacher If you have been a regular on my blog, you know that I try to do a lot of activities that allow the students to move. I do this for a number of reasons. Students have an attention span of about 20 minutes, so if I really want them to understand something I usually make it into an activity that is “fun.”

10 Best Grammar Resources for Teachers - Grammarly Blog Every day is a grammar day for teachers, but the whole world is invited to celebrate morphology and syntax on the fourth of March—National Grammar Day. Everyone loves a party, but how can you motivate students to embrace good grammar the other 364 days of the year? These ten grammar resources might be just what you need. 1 Visual Aids If students visualize how grammar works, they will be able to understand sentence structure. For example, an infographic on Copyblogger.com explains what a dangling participle is. Here’s their example sentence: “After rotting in the cellar for weeks, my brother brought up some oranges.”

Future - Why does your voice sound different on a recording? What makes a recording of our voice sound so different... and awful? It’s because when you speak you hear your own voice in two different ways. Greg Foot explains all. Grammar Auction: Turn grammar review into a game – tekhnologic This is not a new activity and you can find several descriptions of a grammar auction online. You may find these descriptions Grammar Auctions useful: Clare Lavery describes a Grammar Auction for teachingenglish.org.uk. Bjorn Norstrom describes a Grammar Auction for Dave’s ESL café’s idea cookbook. Alex Case suggests some variations on Grammar Auctions for TEFL.net.

Welcome to the English for Uni Website! Welcome to the English for Uni website! This free website is for teachers and learners of English as an additional language, from intermediate levels upwards (i.e. approximately IELTS 6 and above). The site aims to make difficult grammar and academic writing concepts easier to understand. Please use this site as often as you like. You can also download all the explanations and exercises in pdf format.

Integrating pronunciation into classroom activities In my work as a teacher trainer I have been surprised at how often experienced teachers are reluctant to tackle pronunciation issues in class. I can think of at least two reasons why pronunciation tends to be neglected: firstly, the lack of clear guidelines and rules available in course books, and secondly the fact that isolated exercises once a month do not seem to have much of an effect. This is not surprising, however; like all other areas of language teaching, pronunciation needs constant attention for it to have a lasting effect on students, which means integrating it into daily classroom procedures. I find that addressing issues regularly during the language feedback or group correction stage of a lesson helps to focus learners' attention on its importance and leads to more positive experiences. Using student talk to teach pronunciationWord stressVowel soundsDiphthongsWeak formsSentence stressConclusion