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 […]

Yoda: A Jedi craves not these things.

Craving Yoda’s funny and wise pontifications, I went and found some quotes, with their charming and haunting backward sentence structure: No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try. — Much to learn, you still have. — Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is. — Ready, are you? What know you of […]

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 […]

Google Translate

I use Google Translate in my work, and like to introduce it to advanced English students who need to do translation at work. But you need to study very closely what this great tool does and doesn’t do. Based on the World Wide Web, Google Translate is really quite helpful for suggesting collocations (word partnerships) […]

When you become a whistleblower

Yesterday Edward Snowden came forward and outed himself as the whistleblower who leaked information about Boundless Informant. This system developed by the NSA with major corporations, enables raw data to be analyzed and processed in the cloud, including IP addresses, so sender and recipient information can be tracked to rough location. I’m not going to […]

Keep calm and carry on

Keep Calm and Carry On was a motivational poster produced by the British government in 1939, intended to raise the morale of the British public in the event of a German invasion. It was never used, even during the air raids, but kept for the worst case. What could be more British! The poster was […]