Teacher Discussion Forums

Uncle Joe will appreciate nothing you give him.

I think that your first example is the closest in meaning.

The meaning of this sentence is:
Uncle Joe will not appreciate anything you give him.

(If you give Uncle Joe a gift, he will not appreciate the gift.)

I would say one is "poor in English" if you were referring to a school subject. If you were referring to English as an everyday skill, not in the context of a school subject, I would say "poor at English".

I have not done much sentence diagramming, but my husband has. He and I are both living in Japan now, and we are both trying to learn japanese. He is doing very well at reading, and I am doing better at speaking, listening, and even writing. I think that sentence diagramming is useful if you are try...

I am glad that I took the time to read everything said in this thread before posting. In my teaching career, I have taught at a high school in Korea, a private ESL school in Canada, Elemetary schools in Japan, and held teacher traing seminars in both Korea and Japan. I strongly belive in the use of ...

Larry- I suppose that is why many books that I have used have the term "expressing the future using will or be going to". We were however all aware of what the original poster meant by "future tense" so perhaps it is time the to change the terminology? (Glad I'm not the person in charge of editting ...

I will Survive is an old favourite that one of my colleagues used to use back in Vancouver. Love that disco!

I have had a few problems with pronunciation books that were written by British native speakers. An example that comes immediately to mind is the difference between the words "cot" and "caught" - in Canadian English these are homophones. I had to get a British teacher help ME :oops: figure out the d...

One activity that I found worked well with my Korean high school students was story telling. I would tell (not read) them a simple fairy tale that they probably already knew. Then I told them to work in groups to modernize it, making sure that the protagonist was a high school student. I then had th...

Showem- You are fortunate that your students have comprehensible pronunciation. I remember a few years ago in Vancouver I had a student who was looking kind of tired. I asked her what was wrong and she said "no beh-piss " After I asked her to repeat several times, she finally wrote the words NO BREA...

Larry- I go one step further than you do; I bring pocket mirrors to class. When we work on pronunciation I show my students the diagrams from the pronunciation book that I use (I like Pronunciation Pairs and Clear Speech ) I show them my mouth (up close and personal-breath mints are a must!) I teach...

Thanks- I checked out a few of your stories, and may use them with some of my privates. Good stuff.

I try to reassure my students that while they will probably never speak with a native speaker accent, thet they can achieve a very understandable level of pronunciation. I remind them that some of the world's rich and famous speak English as a second language and that their accents are totally under...

Check out www.genkienglish.com for some ideas for games. I would structure your class with some vocabulary (no more than 5 new words). Remeber, when you teach this age group, try to be like a sesame street character. You have to be very excited about each new word so that the kids will be too. Say e...

For conversation topics, I like Conversation Inspirations published by ProLingua Press. Also try www.eslpartyland.com for some good conversation questions. For more in depth topics, I like a book called Discusions A to Z.

I would definitely agree with both Norm and Larry. I do think that English must be learned in a certain order, but not necessarily the same order for all. One problem that I have found with textbooks for "beginners" is that they seem to hit the ground running (The interchange series comes to mind he...