Teacher Discussion Forums

You're right of course. It would have passed a whole army of proof-readers and editors, not to mention having had a context to make it clear. So my "badly written" is hardly fair. I should have said that it was less than clear, as it stood. After all SJ, lolwhites and I all found it hard to understa...

Well, despite some people's lack of difficulty with the said sentence, I'm with lolwhites. It's open to two interpretations. Or more. It may be like those pictures that turn from old ladies into young girls and you suddenly see what other people saw from the beginning. "It was not a castle the sheri...

I've been making a mental list of those participle-adjective pairs that are slightly different depending on meaning. (Sad, isn't it? But then some people plane-spot) So far I've got drunk/drunken, sunk/sunken, proved/proven, blessed/blessed and aged/aged. AmE would include got/gotten. Got any more? ...

Quite so, that's what I was driving at with "you wonder ......... what the bracketed verb afterwards might be" though I don't really understand your "It was not a decision he had expected Massingham to welcome, and nor had he expected M to welcome it" and I'm no wiser as to whether the second "he" i...

Don't let the nick fool you. My Britishness is impeccable. It's never been pecced as far as I know. Generations of sheep-stealers, drovers, brewers, surgeon-barbers and all kinds of stout yeomen.

If there is, i have been blissfully unaware of it for the last fifty years. I doubt if "amongst" is used as much though: it even has a faint whiff of the archaic. I see that while "among" outgoogles "amongst" by a long way, "talk amongst yourselves" beats "talk among yourseves". Which is interesting...

Yo, Larry. It's extremely inelegant because you wonder just who the second "he" is and what the bracketed verb afterwards might be. "Welcomed" or "expected"? The same goes for: "It was not a decision he had expected Massingham to welcome, and he hadn't either." It could mean "and it turned out that ...

I'm afraid I I was overcome with grumpiness so my comment was intemperate, to put it mildly. If you can put your presentation somewhere I'd be very interested to see it.

Come on Lixia. You asked the question. What do you think?

Hey, Daisy. Have you read the thread you started? Any comments?

Is a week long enough to expect to have got some kind of feedback from the thread's starter? Something like "Actually that's not at all what I was after" or "Thanks anyway but that's useless"? Or "Ta"? And no, I don't think "Cheers in advance!" gives me much incentive to answer the next thread of th...

One interesting araa would be to compare the accents used in recorded material for teaching English. There might be an interesting shift in pronunciation from the earliest records and tapes to the most recent CDs. It'd make a good presentation too. Or you could look at shifts in attitudes to have/ha...

What's yours?

And it's not exactly quantum physics. I have no trouble with it, nor do reasonably advanced students of English. Now if Woodcutter had been banging on all this time about the pointlessness of teaching, let alone looking for, any kind of core meaning to modals, especially "should", I'd have been chee...

I don't think there's a useful teachable core meaning to the three main uses of the second form either. I know there's a useful teachable core meaning to the three main uses of the second form. Lorikeet found a Lewis-informed approach to pulling the strands of already learnt structures together to b...