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Archive for the 'teaching' Category

The Onion Radio: Rules Grammar Change

Posted by Anne on March 2nd, 2010

Nonsense rules!

Pigeon: Impossible

Posted by Anne on February 22nd, 2010

Pigeon Impossible, the silent animated film by Lucas Martell released on 9 November that took 4 years to make, passed the 1 million views mark on YouTube after less than 2 weeks online. The film is set in the neighborhood of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., where two of my nieces and I [...]

Crying in my coffee

Posted by Anne on February 20th, 2010

Writing can be a lonely and frustrating business. Writing for online learners of English as I do is particularly tricky: I don’t get much feedback from my readers. As my employers are very busy, asking them to review and edit my work is not always possible. But that means that any errors I make and [...]

Question: When does remixing become second-hand living?

Posted by Anne on February 13th, 2010

Germany has been rocked by scandal this past week, as Helene Hegemann, the 17-year old writer of an astonishing novel called Axolotl Roadkill, has been shown up by Munich blogger Deef Pirmasens (Gefühlskonserve) to have lifted whole passages of her book from the writings of one Airen, a blogger in Berlin. Her publisher had asked [...]

The Google “search stories”

Posted by Anne on February 9th, 2010

Google has a series of charming ads on YouTube called “Search stories” that are just perfect for English lessons. This one was broadcast on Sunday during the Superbowl. I’m going to play a few of the series in my classes tomorrow and have groups develop the profiles and tell the stories of the people doing [...]

Snowclones

Posted by Anne on February 8th, 2010

I’ve just learned from Stan Carey what a snowclone is. Geoffrey Pullum developed the concept on Language Log back in 2004, for a clichéd phrasal template that gets repeated in innumerable variants.
Geoffrey Pullum:
“I was looking at things like “In space, no one can hear you X”, where the customizability is that you get to choose [...]

Question: Why do you write? Why don’t you write?

Posted by Anne on February 7th, 2010

Why do you write or blog? If you don’t write or blog, why not?
I finally called off my blog project yesterday after reading the Pew’s Report on teens not blogging and twittering. (Summary in Mashable) The reasons given for the lack of interest which I, too, have experienced in the group of people I approached [...]