Humor4u

I'm a ________ (1) teacher of English (what has recently become a bad word has been blanked out as to not offend anyone). As readers may have gathered from the content of this blog, I love language. I’m also a language learner. I’ve spent all my teaching and training career improving my knowledge of English and honing my understanding of how it works. Especially since I started teaching more lexically, I’ve been paying more attention to how words combine into patterns and how vocabulary interacts with grammar to create meaning. I believe students have always benefited from my heightened language awareness. When answering a student’s question about the difference between “comfortable” and “convenient”, I can say that “convenient” usually refers to time and location (e.g. Would 5 o’clock be convenient to you? or I live really close to the school so I can just walk, which is really convenient ). I can give the following examples to help students who confuse “worthy” and “worth”: wort...

For most of the 20th century, there was a deep-rooted tradition in the ELT, which dates back to the Direct Method, that L1 in the classroom should be avoided at all costs. Although there were some alternative methods, such as Community Language learning (aka ‘counsel-learning’) and Dodson’s Bilingual Method, which made use of the learners’ L1 and used translation, most ELT methods of the last century were clearly ‘target-language’ only and some even went as far as to take a clearly anti-L1 stance in order to avoid interference. In recent years, however, translation and the use of L1 in ELT have made a comeback. As I was recently adding final touches to a presentation on the topic of translation I got this email from a colleague: NB. "Inspectors" are MOE supervisors who make periodic visits to schools, known in some countries as "superintendents" Indeed, thanks to whom or what evidence? Let's look at some arguments for and against translation in ELT. Translation ...

Eighteen containers in assorted shapes and sizes on display in the corner of the room. Fourteen EFL teachers organized in small groups according to their L1: English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, French. Aim: categorise the objects; discussion in the group should be held in your L1 Purpose: to show that the same objects will fall into different categories depending on the language you use to categorise them.  For example, the English-speaking group divided the objects which you can see in the picture into 8 categories: bottle (4), container (5), tube (2), can (2), jar (1), case (1), jug (1), case (1), canister (1). A British English speaker further divided cans into a can (soft drink) and a tin (of tuna). Hebrew speakers came up with 7 categories, with the can/tin of tuna ending up in the same category as “English” containers (including tupperware) while Russian speakers grouped the notorious can/tin together with the jar under the same title “banka”. Idea: not mine. It was inspir...