Practice academic writing skills 2: Ambiguity
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 prepositions. Compare: […]
Practice academic writing skills 1: Parallelism
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 […]
The Lords: Poor Boy
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 […]
Weird w
I’m having a hard time with that weird phoneme, /w/. Gerald Kelly puts it in a table (Kelly 1988:7) as both bilabial – using both lips, as with /p/, /b/ and /m/ – and velar – using the back of the tongue against the soft palate, like /k/, /g/ and /ŋ/. Bilabial, yes. But velar? […]
Phonology 101
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 […]
Unplugged teacher training
I enjoyed an interview of Anthony Gaughan by Andi White at this year’s IATEFL (online), a real conversation about whether dogme is ‘enough’. Andi mentions “principled ecclectivism“, essentially fitting the method to the learner. Anthony responds that a good teacher should be able to operate in a wide range of ways. Though I like the […]
Sue Palmer
In her IATEFL plenary on ADHD, Asperger Syndrome and dyslexia, Sue Palmer hits home: that development happens in ‘biological time’, and that children are missing out on essential interpersonal learning when they have less quality face time. She refers to Peter Hobson, a specialist on autism. “In this presentation, she discusses how rapid socio-cultural change, […]
