Comedian Salesman Kenny Brooks: “I’ve got a disease called enthusiasm”. Catching!
Goes into suburbia with his cleaning liquid, deals with bad attitudes, and lays his word wit on his potential customers, playing to their social anxieties (”Don’t laugh too hard cause the neighbors gonna see this black kid scrubbing your windows”).
My favorite one-liners:
My mom says, “If [...]
This wonderful video is not just a joy to ponder…
It also shows perfectly, by engineering natural speech into song, how rhythmic English is, and how speakers of English in the UK, US and Down Under will stress the content words and separate what they say into phrases. This is something that my students from other [...]
I’m still struggling to teach scientific writing to a diverse group of PhD candidates that I only see occasionally. My latest attempt is to give them a set of online tools to analyze their genre of target texts (published works and their own work in progress), and to tell me how they like what the [...]
This is one of Steve Job’s last presentations, still explaining “his” products with inspired simplicity and clarity.
Focus with me for a moment on his metalanguage (often called signposting), that is the language he uses to take us from one point to the next. Metalanguage or signposting varies widely between presentation types, and is generally very [...]
One of the greatest challenges for non-native academic users of English as a Lingua Franca is keeping up with what is being said in discussions to the point where they can process the information in real time and contribute themselves. In a word, the challenge is information overload. Not only are you trying to understand [...]
Stan Carey of the Sentence First blog and the MacMillan blog and sundry other lingusitic habitats is holding a limerick competition – yeah! – and there are some really great ones there, don’t miss them. Deadline: September 21st.
My contributions are a bit dour for limericks, but such is the life of an English teacher:
Krashen wrote [...]
I was just on Facebook to Stew when I stumbled across a video… and bingo, here’s a nice task for you learners: Tell a story about something two of you did together. OK, you don’t really have to have done this, ok? You can make it up – invent it. So: It should be a [...]
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