Humor4u

Photo by  Marc Nozell  via Flickr [ CC BY 2.0 ] One of the hottest news this week has been Melania Trumps’ allegedly plagiarized speech. Why allegedly? Because although Donald Trump’s wife address at the 2016 Republican Convention bears marked similarities to Michele Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention, there is not much in it that would effectively constitute stealing in the linguistic sense. In the last 30 years, corpus research (study of language through samples of 'real world' text) has shown that language is highly formulaic, i.e. consisting of recurring strings of words, otherwise known as “chunks”. What makes them chunks is the fact that they are stored in and retrieved from memory as ‘wholes’ rather than generated on a word-by-word basis at the moment of language production.  Pub lic speeches are a prime example of formulaicity in language in that they consist of conventionalised routines; some of these are very fixed, highly probable combinations who...

Sinclair's seminal work - the bible of corpus linguistics In this post I would like to defend linguistic corpora and their relevance to the ELT field which Hugh Dellar raises doubts about. Years ago before I became familiar with corpus tools (corpus as in linguistic corpus = "collection of samples of real-world texts stored on computer"; plural = corpora) we had a fierce debate with my colleagues whether to use the preposition to or for after the noun hint . We wanted to produce posters for English learning centres we had set up for a number of high schools and each poster was meant to provide "Hints for/to speaking / listening etc". Emails were sent back and forth about what preposition should be used and the argument inevitably turned to the British/American distinction until somebody used Google Fight to compare hints to and hints for . Google Fight provided us with pseudo-scientific evidence that hints for is slightly more common than hints to – it was ba...

Who is sloppier when it comes to grammar or should we all just get over it? A recent discussion on a teachers’forum has made me wonder amusingly and bemusedly again about correctness, prescriptive grammar rules and how English teachers just LOVE grammar and arguing about it - I wish lexis would prompt such heated debates, for example what verb should go with knowledge : gain or acquire ? or some such. Among the comments about pointlessness of teaching grammar to students -  why bother if native speakers make mistakes - the one that stuck with me was an amusing remark made by my friend, colleague and former co-mentor Adele who often comes by this blog (Adele, are you reading?). She wrote: […] It took me a while after marrying a Brit, to get used to the poor grammar prevalent in the UK even among many educated people. Adele Interesting thought… Recently I was coordinating Jeremy Harmer ’s visit to Israel . As part of his programme, he was scheduled to appear as ...

Sometime in March the day after the Oscar ceremony, one of my Facebook friends posted: Mazal Tov to the King's Speech! to which I replied: Leo Selivan   and Strangers No More - the best short documentary about Rogozin School in Tel Aviv 16 hours ago   ·   Like (I was rooting for the film to win since a little over a week earlier I had visited the school with a delegation from the UK ).  My comment prompted a somewhat sarky reply from another Facebooker (the name has been changed): Sarky Facebooker   I didn't realise that there an Oscar category for documentaries about the Rogozin School in Tel Aviv. Seems like a case of over-specialisation to me. 13 hours ago   ·   Like   ·    1 person Admittedly my sentence was not very well formed and had I been writing it, say for this blog, I should have written “and Strangers No More, a documentary about the Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, which won in the Best Short Documentary category” .  Bu...

Summary of my talk at the MOFET  Institute on 15 February 2011 Post-intermediate EFL learners already have a command of grammar structures , reasonable vocabulary , with particularly good receptive skills , and can generally communicate well in a variety of situations. What they need now is to extend the range of vocabulary to be able to convey subtler meanings and use language appropriately , and make the all-too-difficult transition from receptive to productive use. There are several paths they can take to improve their English language proficiency and move beyond the notorious "intermediate plateau". In my workshop I highlighted the following areas which often pose difficulty for post-intermediate learners: 1. conceptual metaphors 2. formulaic language 3. multi-part verbs 4. collocational competence These areas of difficulty have been pointed out by a number of studies which compared native-speaker and non-native speaker corpora and which were referred to in my talk. F...

An activity for adult learners based on the song by Timbaland featuring Katy Perry focusing on chat-up lines, the future conditional and adjectives ending with -ed . Follow the links below to access: TEACHERS NOTES IF WE EVER MEET AGAIN WORKSHEET