Teacher Discussion Forums

I wouldn't want to offend anyone, but I think that the above discussion is funny

Do you think you would teach languages the way you do if you had not been trained as a language teacher? I don't think so. I'm sure I could not even teach Greek, which is my mother tongue. I have not been trained for that and I would be at a loss. However, apart from training and seminars and study...

Thank you for your replies.

Dave123 very interesting link

I was talking to an English friend of mine the other day and he said' I'm down with the kids when it comes to all this technological jiggery-pokery! '

What exactly does 'be down with the kids' mean? Is it an idiomatic expression? I tried googling for it but it didn't help

metal56 wrote:

Miss Elenious wrote:
'I used to not play football.'

To me, that always sounds like a refusal. EG "At school, I always refused to play football".

Can you give an example?

'To be or not to be, that is the question...' This is the phrase I use to teach the negation of the infinitive to my students. I consider 'used to' however to be one word, that is 'to' cannot be separated from used. That is why 'I used not to play football' does not sound right to me. How about 'I u...

All the above are possible, but do they have the same meaning? I would say that the first refers to time and the speaker is interested in a chronolohical order of the events. the second, I would analyse it into a relative clause referring to the past = 'who was rejected' and the third one I would a...

lolwhites wrote:

How about suffer death? Like it?

Hmmm. Can you suffer death? I thought the moment of death was the end of suffering?

nitpick over

It's the beginning if you go to hell... (he,he)

To me, all these are possible: John Smith, (after) being rejected, by two companies, is planning to have a third try. John Smith, rejected by two companies, is planning to have a third try. John Smith, suffering rejection from two companies, is planning to have a third try. All the above are possib...

oh yes, I wanted to ask you something else...is there a difference between a native Greek speaker and a Greek native speaker. Is the second ungrammatical?

I keep hearing "adult native English speakers do not commit errors in usage". Do you agree with that "quote"? I don't know about native English speakers but native Greek speakers certainly do: errors in tenses, collocations, spelling... But, to err is human. Have the English gone a step further? Wh...

"metal56"

And how about "consist of"?

May I ask what is ungrammatical about 'consist of'?

Is creativity accepted only when produced by native speakers?Can second language learners be creative as well and not be corrected? Could the same 'creative' expression be accepted as creativity when uttered by a native speaker and "frowned upon" when expressed by a SL learner?

"We use the + nationality adjective ending in -ese or -ish with a plural verb, to refer to all people of that nationality: The Chinese are very hard-working. The Spanish often go to sleep in the afternoon." check out the following link http://www.edufind.com/english/grammar/NOUNS6.cfm Is there such ...

I think that very young learners don't really need metalanguage to start producing the second language and understanding basic structure. However, older learners , and I don't only mean adults but also those who have a higher grammar knowledge in their own language, can be helped by some basic metal...