Teacher Discussion Forums

Although What's he going to be doing there? or What will he be doing there? are more "correct" (i.e. better given the pedagogical point of future plans), I think What is he doing there? is an OK shorthand (and if it's spontaneous authentic data then you sort of have your answer right there LOL - it ...

You're probably closer to any changes than I am (here in the UK), Lori. I should check back through my grammars and maybe get a more up-to-date edition here or there (probably stuff by Leech [et al] rather than e.g. Swan, whose PEU I've found can be a bit unreliable/puzzling in its advice about what...

Googling the term that Sally used uncovered the items all right, but I've always heard them simply called police or military call signs or codewords. You don't need to yourself use those NATO codewords when spelling things over the phone though, just use whatever common words come to mind! E.g. Appl...

Hiya Lori, how's it going?

I just wish the guy could articulate his objections more clearly (perhaps he should write a grammar of his own LOL), but then, to do so he'd actually have to understand a lot more than his pet (and apparently irrational) hate.

If you want to see some serious confusion about Past Perfect at least, there's a reviewer on Amazon who's found fault with dozens of grammar books for using the form LOL. It's actually impossible to work out quite what the guy's problem is (other than he doesn't appear to have grasped that a "superf...

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You must've hit the New topic rather than the Post reply button LOL (i.e. you should've replied on Hereinchina's original thread: http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=11259 ). Hello, I'm not sure if I should say "don't lose focus of your goal" or "don't lose focus on your goal", or if b...

I haven't seen or heard from Woody in what must be two or three years now. I think he was looking at qualifying to teach Chinese among other ventures, so he got kind of busy. I think everyone is unfortunately having to work harder for less and less money these days, so whatever time and energy they ...

Although in Chinese one concept (压, ya1) may be involved in expressing "two" meanings, in English the concepts and words plural seem reasonably distinct: the pressuring of someone precedes them feeling stressed/~ out about it. That is, you can't really "stress" somebody into doing something (thoug...

Heh, you're welcome, Andre. Thanks for posting the link to phraseup, could come in handy. Oh, and good luck with your lessons!

Well, they're prestigious universities and presses, located in a (the?) major birthplace of ELT, and they early recognized the economic potential of the subject field, and have attracted scores of authors and thus built up impressive current and back catalogues along with experienced editorial and p...

Hi Andre. When searching for specific strings (i.e. those words and only those words, and in that precise word order), you need to enclose them in double speech marks (like an exact quotation) in the Google search box. Doing so produces the following surface results (but I've not given numbers of re...

There's no kiss emoticon so this will have to do:

Well, it was hard to know quite what you were asking then, but no harm no foul. I'd just be wary of apparently theorizing (and thereby generating "counter-examples") on the basis of explanations, least of all of present prefect, because its standard explanations hardly seem that clear or usable to b...