Snowclones
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 […]
Question: Why do you write? Why don’t you write?
http://annehodgson.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/motivation.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadWhy 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 […]
Jean-Paul Nerrier’s Globish
This is a comment on a great post by The Tesla Coil on the Graddolization of EFL. David Graddol honored MELTA with a visit last summer. Thanks, Tony Watt for the Globish link: Only 4% of the people communicating with each other today in English are both/ all native speakers. Jean-Paul Nerrier wants to “make it […]
Agile one to one. Progress, step by step
This is how I teach. Aiming too high can cause negative stress. I’ve learned to break learning down into small, productive, rewarding steps. I was thrilled and very priviledged to be sponsored by Cornelsen to present this at BESIG, the Business English Special Interest Group, in Poznan last weekend. It was a great event. This […]
One-upmanship
Just rereading a chapter in Peter Wilberg’s great book, One to One, entitled “Your basic attitude – one-upmanship?” Is this you?
Question: Do you believe in learning styles?
http://annehodgson.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/learning.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadIn my profession there’s a hot debate going on about “learning styles”. You know, finding out whether you are a visual learner and need to see things to understand them, or an auditory learner who prefers to hear things, or whether you are a kinethetic learner and have to […]
Losing face in English
I woke up this morning thinking about the debate on this blog on Westerwelle. It seems to me that this is an interesting case of a person losing face in public because he is being forced to speak English. BTW, I think the discussion has showed that both sides lost face: Westerwelle was most obviously […]
