Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi emile, I wasn't a course book hater, but for years I didn't use coursebooks for 2 reasons. Firstly, I liked to be in control of the syllabus, including the grammar and vocab input. Secondly, I was put off by my brief experiences of using such books because I felt too much time was wasted on havin...

no grammar, no reading, no writing, no listening, only vocab and speaking. Yikes! Here are a few suggestions. When he makes a mistake, will he allow you to write the mistakes onto the whiteboard? It's sometimes useful for people to visualize their errors. Also, after a while, you will have a dozen ...

Something that is often overlooked in magazines is the advertising - but it can be very useful in teaching. All sorts of language is used (comparatives, superlatives, conditionals) as well as puns and idioms. Why not select some ads for products that the students would like to have and go from there...

I'm not sure if this is congruous or just plain flippant:

How many people work in your department?

- About half of them!

Yes, fluffy, the sad reality of most language teaching in most countries is that it is arranged for the convenience of teachers, rather than to actually help kids speak the language in a competent fashion. And difficult directions? Here's something I occasionally throw in to lessons with adults who ...

Sounds interesting - but could you define what you mean by 'conversation patterns'?

For the smallest piece of punctuation, the "spot" has quite a few names. I agree that, when talking about numbers, we say 'point'. For example, 'the value of PI is three point one four one'. When we speak about the internet, we say 'BBC dot com'. In writing, it's called 'full stop' in British Englis...

Cambridge University Press : English 365

A colleague recommended this series to me to use with adult learners. However, after looking at them, they seem a little 'light'.

Has anyone used this range of books? What do you think of them?

...but surely all these examples are evidence of languages evolving by taking words and adapting them as the situation requires? Eventually, they would no longer be seen as 'foreign' or 'English' words. There are thousands of words in English that have been 'borrowed' from other languages. Who now w...

Hi revel, And welcome back! I'm interested in your present experience - please keep us up to date! One day, we'll all be teaching in front a screen - 'virtual' learning environments will be so common that physically sitting in a room with a lot of people in order to learn something will be seen as a...

Sorry, I don't know of any articles on this subject - but I do find that Google is a very useful tool in EFL teaching. I often teach technicians, and they have very specific questions about particular components or tools. In the past, I referred to technical dictionaries or trade catalogues. Now, I ...

Interesting topic! You're right, there are many idioms using the imperial system. A couple that spring to mind are 'Give them an inch and they'll take a mile' and 'to go the extra mile'. The only metric one I can think of is really an imperial one. 'It weighs a ton' could become 'it weighs a tonne' !

In an appendix of Business Grammar Builder (Macmillan), the author (Paul Emmerson) states that '...The Past in English can refer to social distance and distant probability as well as its more obvious meaning of distance in time .' He then gives an example 'Knowing that we can use the past to show so...

...and in case anyone is wondering, 'The Wonder of Woolies' was the advertising catchphrase for a store called 'Woolworth's'. (Is it still used in their publicity?)

Apparently it was quite successful if we still remember it today!

...and in case anyone is wondering, 'The Wonder of Woolies' was the advertising catchphrase for a store called 'Woolworth's'. (Is it still used in their publicity?)

Apparently it was quite successful if we still remember it today!