Today my main task was to find examples of discourse markers in context in a movie trailer, explaining their functions in a given utterance. I chose Midnight in Paris by Woody Allen and, because it caught my imagination, transcribed and thought through more than necessary. It’s fun to examine a dialogue and make what is [...]
This brilliant sketch by the late Ronnie Barker is an eye-opener – or an ear-opener! – to how we preempt meaning when we listen. I found it on Abiloon’s lovely blog – full transcript there.
I would use this video to raise student awareness for the way we anticipate what the speaker will say next.
In [...]
One of the most important elements of good writing is clarity. Unfortunately, English has a lot of potential for ambiguity, which makes it easy to write ambiguous sentences. Great for humor, of course, but not a lot of help when it comes to writing works of science! One example is the use of [...]
Parallelism adds elegance to your writing:
Clumsy: They work with great care and effectively.
Elegant: They work carefully and effectively.
Clumsy: Making contacts is as important as to give a good presentation.
Elegant: Making contacts is as important as giving a good presentation.
Clumsy: We analyzed the extensive data, which was highly complex.
Elegant: We analyzed the extensive, highly complex data.
Clumsy: [...]
Hat tip to Nik Peachey. A nice little video to introduce reluctant learners to the usefulness of pronunciation practice, isn’t it? I’d ask students to rank the speakers according to whom they’d have most trouble communicating with.
Still grinning about how wery hard life was in Berlin in 1965. The German beat band, The Lords, sing and dance “Poor boy”, one of their greatest hits. Now, I’m not knocking writing and singing in a foreign language, on the contrary, it’s really great! But for an English teacher like me it’s fascinating to [...]
On our course Patricia introduced us to two great sites to help with phonology.
First, there’s the excellent online typewriter, the Phonemic Character Keyboard, which is based on the comprehensive IPA character picker, two tools which, taken together, are just what you need to be able to write a post like this!
Then, there’s the University of [...]
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