Teacher Discussion Forums

I take your points here, Harzer. I think, as I re-ponder the examples I gave, that your intuitions ARE more accurate than mine for the examples on which you comment. I had totally missed the "the hillside across the river (from a given standpoint) "interpretation of ‘the hillside over the river’. It...

Hi Duncan, First, thanks for telling me how to use the ‘quote’ feature. I have to confess to feeling some embarrassment about my post. Looking over the post again, I find I did not really make myself very clear. In fact, I wrote it fairly quickly and maybe got a little muddled by the time I got to t...

Andrew Patterson wrote: "Above" is always stationery but over may imply movement. There is overlap, however. One can say hang a picture over the fireplace or above it. If you want to play safe, though you will never be wrong if you reserve "above" for stationery things and over for moving things. Ab...

Hi Maria, I can’t steer you to any websites that have the sort of material you are looking for, but I can give you an explanation of an activity I developed for my college classes for the purpose of practising reported speech, if it is of any use to you. It will depend on the ability of students to ...

I teach English conversation at a college in Beijing and when I first came here some two and a half years ago, the first problem that confronted me was getting students ‘to open their mouths’. Except for a handful of more capable students, nobody would speak, even when asked a question directly. It ...

I’ve begun a new thread here because the original thread on this issue was back in January and I think the people involved in posting to that thread may not look there again after so long. The easiest way, I think, to type in phonemic script (IPA) when using MSWord is to download a small software (w...