A lot of students worry about their accents. They ask me how to pronounce the word “again” correctly. They refuse to go to university in India because they don’t want an Indian accent. Some students even tell me they won’t take lessons from me because they want a proper British accent not an ugly American one.
The fact of the matter is that because English is a world language, a lot of different people speak English. And because both the UK and the US are countries that exerted a lot of …Continue

Can’t remember if I’ve posted on this or not, but as I’m working on the new site, I’m going through some of the ESL resources I use a lot. Purdue’s Online Writing Center has an awesome section for ESL Teachers and Students. Really good explanations of all parts of speech and sticky points of grammar broken down by how we use them and taking into account problems that students often have. So if you want to analyze a strange sentence like, “The throat sighs!” and figure out where the subject, …Continue

The Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills was told by Parliament that its annual report makes no sense. Specifically, the report uses too much jargon and ambiguity to hide the fact that the Department has no idea what to do. Others One piece of bureaucratese was singled out as being completely incomprehensible, even to the Department itself:
“An overarching national improvement strategy will drive up quality and performance underpinned by specific plans for strategically significant areas of activity, such as workforce and technology. The capital investment strategy will continue to renew …Continue

I’ve put up a few sample TOEFL essays here, here and some tips for writing essays here.
Now I’m going to try something slightly different. I’m putting up a sample TOEFL writing test question and I encourage readers to try to answer. Email your answer to walton [at] englishadvantage [.] com (replacing @ for at, obviously) and I’ll email you back comments and notes. I will also post the best essay up here, with a link of the writer’s choice. I’ll link to you blog, website, facebook profile, whatever you want.
Question:Do …Continue

Barack Obama attended Columbia University and then Harvard. He is well-known for his eloquence and his intelligence. But it turns out he has a nasty habit of abusing personal pronouns. According to someone who worked for his campaign, the President-Elect likes to say “for Michelle and I”.
As everyone knows, or should know, prepositions take the object form of pronouns. It should be “for Michelle and me.” Many people do have trouble with the point when there is a proper noun (someone’s name, for example) between the preposition and the …Continue

On director and writer Kevin Smith’s Facebook page I noticed a comment and I couldn’t tell if the poster was joking or not: “Love you films let me know if you need and editor…” I’m not sure he’d make a great editor.
1) you should be your2) This is a run-on sentence. Try: Love your films. Let… 3) and should be an4) It is unclear why the sentence ends in an ellipsis. A simple period would do.
I suspect the poster was making a joke, but possibly not.

A couple more sample tests I made. These are listening tests featuring yours truly on vocals! These are designed to be similar to the iBT TOEFL listening section but they are also great practice for general listening comprehension and understanding in English.
If you like these, check out my otherTOEFL resources

The English Language: An academic lecture
Changing Classes: A dialogue between a student and the registrar

Since TOEFL resources seem to be a popular topic around here, I thought I would post links to a few TOEFL reading tests I designed. They should be pretty similar to the iBT questions you would find on ETS’ real TOEFL. Check them out. Even if you aren’t preparing for the TOEFL, the tests should be good reading comprehension practice in English.
At the end, you will get a summary of how many you got right and how many wrong, and a chance to review each question. I tried to cover …Continue

With the holidays and this and that, I’ve had a lot of time off from this blog. So to reinvigorate the blog, and hopefully help people learn English, I’ve decided to publish some of my worksheets and lesson plans on this site. It’s an obviously useful resource for teachers of ESL but I also will try to choose lesson plans that students can study by themselves.
So here are two worksheets I put together on describing people. The first is a list of adjectives and expressions by category and the …Continue

I just read a fascinating post on English in Singapore. Specifically, how they love to use modal verbs.
For example, answering requests with “can”:
Could you please get me a copy of this document when you return?’‘Can!’
‘Would you be able to make it for dinner tonight?’‘Can!’
That’s actually kind of wonderful in its literalism. It reminds me of the old joke teachers and older siblings often play.An unsuspecting student asks, “Can I go to the bathroom?”“I don’t know. Can you?This eventually results in the more polite and accurate question: “May I go to …Continue

The problem with learning anything is that you need proper motivation. A natural talent for languages will help you learn English for example, but if you don’t dedicate time to studying you will never master the language. And frankly studying languages can be extremely boring. So how about if you could pick up new vocabulary by learn interesting facts about the history of words? Not enough fun? What if you could learn new vocabulary, learn interesting facts about new and old words from the girl pictured on the right?Marina Orlova, …Continue

I’ve been planning a conversation lesson around the 2008 US presidential election and I thought I would share some resources I found.
With any conversation class, you want to make sure you have lots of background information. When dealing with something as complicated as the US election for president, the class is going to have a lot of questions. So you either need to read up and bring materials to look up anything you didn’t memorize. Or you need resources that the students can read and research themselves.
Here is some great …Continue

This week (Sept. 27th to Oct 4th) is National Banned Book week in the US. This week is dedicated to celebrating freedom of speech by reminding people of what happens when books are banned. Societies and communities that refuse to let people read suffer from stagnation. Unless we are exposed to ideas from all sources we can never learn to think critically, to develop innovations, or to be exposed to a wide range of perspectives.
Living in a former Soviet country where banning literature that didn’t meet state standards of ideology, …Continue

In a recent post, I talked about mondegreens and silly lyrics in pop music. Last night while watching Mama Mia, I came across another pop song that serves as a fabulous teaching tool because it illustrates a very common error for ESL students.
ABBA’s “Money, Money, Money” has the lines:
Money, Money, MoneyMust be funnyIn a rich man’s world

I think they mean that it must be fun in a rich man’s world. It’s a common mistake to assume that fun is the adjective form of fun. There’s also the problem …Continue