Be like Bill for grammar (and vocabulary) practice

The third person singular of the Present Simple tense is known to be particularly problematic for learners and when the "Be Like Bill...

Closely connected

Photo by Sudhamshu Hebbar on Flickr [CC BY 2.0] An article written by the British linguist Vyvyan Evans entitled “Language Instinct is a My...

News Quiz 2013 - Vocabulary

Images by Tim Evanson ,   Gene  Hunt &  Alex Alishevskikh  via Flickr As usual, as a follow up to the traditional end-of-year news quiz,...

We are lexically indebted to him

Image source: www.willis-elt.co.uk I opened my Facebook yesterday morning and was saddened to see Chia Suan Chong’s post about the passing o...

The highway to fluency and a roundabout way to grammar

Photo by @GoldsteinBen via eltpics on Flickr A second lesson with two new pre-intermediate (A2) students (I usually put my private student...

It doesn't matter

Photo by Victoria Boobyer via eltpics   Do your students often say "it's depend..." or things like "it's not cost mu...

SLA research: still in the shackles of traditional grammar?

Second Language Acquisition ( SLA ) research also needs a lexical revolution to free itself from the shackles of grammar tyranny.  Rant aler...

What corpora HAVE done for us

Sinclair's seminal work - the bible of corpus linguistics In this post I would like to defend linguistic corpora and their relevance to ...