This is just a really good idea my director had that I’m going to try tomorrow to stop my students from using their little pocket translators. I’m curious if anyone has ever tried anything like this and how it turned out.
The idea is to take a short text and then translate it into your students’ language via Google Translate, or whatever service your students love and show them the result. I took it a step further, as I don’t speak their language(s), and translated it back into English. Since the …Continue

I mentioned this briefly in a tweet, but A Google a Day is a great tool for teaching ESL/EFL students how to find information on the Internet, giving them practice picking out key words, using synonyms and reading for specific information.
If you haven’t seen it yet, A Google a Day gives you a trivia question that you have to answer by googling for the answer. The questions are carefully worded to make it more difficult to search for. You won’t see questions like, “How tall is a sequoia tree?” …Continue

It was hard to resist trying the I Write Like Me analyzer, which tries to match your style to famous authors.
Apparently, the latest Randy the Raccoon story is in the style of Gertrude Stein, who is most famous for her “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”. As I understand, she did try to bring simplicity to writing, so I suppose it’s logical that a story aimed at children would be compared to her.
Interestingly, most of my essays, which are probably closest to my natural writing …Continue

Catch the Crooks with That and Which is a cool, short little game that tests your understanding of the use of that and which. It’s a fun little game. If you want to review the difference, there’s also a nice explanation on the same site.

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.

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

In my post on terms for mistakes in English, I left out a whole category: Mondegreens or misheard lyrics (Mondegreens actually refer to mishearing and misunderstanding any phrase). The name comes from the American writer, Sylvia Wright who recalled how when her mother used to read her the 17th century ballad “The Bonnie Earl O’ Murray.”, she thought one line was: “And Lady Mondegreen.” In fact it was, “And laid him on the green.”
One of the most popular mondegreens is the hearing “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” from …Continue

Most students who want to learn business English are interested in understanding technical terms and phrases like force majeure, marginal cost and vertical integration. However when they get in the meeting room with English speaking businessmen, they hear a lot of strange terms like getting everyone on board or thinking out of the box or synergy
Some of these new terms, sometimes called office speak are useful, but a lot of them are pretty silly especially when used by bosses who think that using a new word makes them a better …Continue

Online Picture Dictionary is an awesome idea. He takes vocab words from GRE word lists (ie big hard words) and posts example sentences, synonyms and a picture to help you understand and remember. It’s a great way to learn vocab because it gives a context and a visual clue that is stored in your memory. The sentences are pretty clever and often funny–which makes it easy to learn.
Check it out. I do have one reservation though if you want to learn English from the site. Srikant’s grammar is …Continue

Barak Obama, leading candidate for President of the US, announced today his plan to fund all universities directly from the government budget. In a speech in Pennsylvania, which holds its primaries in 3 weeks, he said:
Education should be available to everyone at every level regardless of ability to pay. The only way to lift the poor from disadvantage is through education. Education means better jobs and higher salaries and more self-respect.
He went on to cite the problem of how prestigious universities often set extremely high tuition costs which most …Continue