Saturday Night Live Minnesota News Cold Open

Saturday Night Live has picked up on current political events in the USA. The comedy series opens this week’s episode with a fictional Minnesota morning show with two Black anchors, played by Ego Nwodim and Kenan Thompson, and two white anchors, played by Kate McKinnon and Alex Moffat. They begin their weekly news review by […]

Getting real in teaching listening

Book review: Richard Cauldwell: Phonology for Listening. Teaching the Stream of Speech. Speech in Action. Birmingham, UK 2013. ISBN 0954344723, ISBN-13: 978-0954344726. Printed on demand by Amazon. €25.68 http://www.speechinaction.com Richard Cauldwell makes a key point: Listening acquisition lags behind the acquisition of other skills, he says, because we treat listening skills as something learners will […]

State of the art: Machine translation

In a word: Aaaaargh! The German machine translation below is complete nonsense. Lexis is far more complicated than you’d think. A word like ‘searing’ can be a verb, an adjective or a noun. Consider how differently ‘even’ can translate –’even heating’ has been translated here as  ‘sogar Heizung’ rather than ‘gleichmäßige Erwärmung’. And ‘seasoning’ is […]

Grammar Guru: You’ll want to turn left at the light

You’ll want to… The pragmatics of this phrase is interesting: Driver: How do I get to the lake? Pedestrian: You’ll want to turn left at the light up there and then just go straight til you hit Shore Drive. Why do we consider it acceptable and polite to predict what the person we are talking […]

Flula

Thanks to Flula Borg for deconstructing idioms and also for getting right in there with prejudices against Germans – and just dealing with them. I really like Flula being playful and silly with My Drunk Kitchen presenter Hannah Hart.

Creatives and their art forms

English for Artists should highlight different art forms, e.g. profiling artists expressing themselves in the various media. The Thrash Lab vlog and YouTube playlist include a profile of Saber, a graffiti artist who has branched out. In this profile he describes the work that made him a name, similarities to typography, and how he reacts […]

Painting from Life

Videos on painting from life by The Art Students’ League of New York would be useful in an English course for Artists. Here I would focus on how an artist, Sharon Sprung,  describes her process as she paints. Notice how difficult it is to multitask, producing both visually and verbally, and both commenting on the […]