Search

Kishi Bashi

Posted by Anne on April 3rd, 2013

Wow. Kishi Bashi. I hadn’t seen the ads, instead discovering him through Paste Magazine. All that attention to detail, craftsmanship and polish. Animal Collective meets Andrew Bird and classical Japanese music.
They are hosting a video-based riddle contest for idioms like

wearing _ _ _ _ h _ _ _ _  _ _  your  _ [...]

“What are you selling?” “Personality”

Posted by Anne on January 3rd, 2013

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 [...]

Online tools and resources for scientific writing

Posted by Anne on February 1st, 2012

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 [...]

iCloud: iUnderstand

Posted by Anne on October 19th, 2011

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 [...]

Limericks and the life of an English teacher

Posted by Anne on September 19th, 2011

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 [...]

Finish your partner’s sentences

Posted by Anne on September 8th, 2011

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 [...]

Hola Barcelona

Posted by Anne on August 19th, 2011

Patricia and I made a quick video for today’s lesson on the weather. Thank you, Patricia!

Handout session 13 Aug 19, 2011