I covered some Olympic vocabulary in a previous post and I am continuing the series now with Athletics since that’s the big event at the moment in Beijing.
Athletics or Track and Field, as it is sometimes called has a lot of equipment and therefore its own special vocabulary. Since it’s easier to show you than tell, here is a list of events with pictures that should make it pretty clear, and some key terms:

Discus

The discus is thrown and the winner is the athlete who can throw it the furthest.

Javelin

The javelin …Continue

Since the Summer Olympic Games have opened in Beijing, I wanted to share some Olympics vocab in English. It’s a fun topic and almost everyone watches or at least keeps track of what’s going on. So take a chance to practice your English with native speakers by talking about the Olympics or follow the news in English. Here are some descriptions of key terms by sport to help you out.

Archery is a sport played with a bow and arrow. The participants or archers try to hit the target by …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

This is a list of some expressions that befuddled my students in recent classes. All of them are tied together by the fact that they are idiomatic and that they are all humorous, or have a degree of sarcasm or irony attached to them.
Note that most of these phrases are slightly informal. You might use them with colleagues or friends, or in an informal meeting but not in a formal setting.
Ass-backwards means to do something in the wrong order, to do the logical first step second as in:“They’re spending money …Continue

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a bit. I read a great post on using “like” as a substitute for “said”, “thought” or “felt”.This usage is most commonly associated with teenagers and many grammarians feel that it is not correct. However as Patricia O’Connor points out in The New York Times Magazine, teenagers aren’t the only ones who use it and anyway associating it with teenagers and therefore bad language isn’t fair.In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, here are a few examples:The salesperson said …Continue

One of the hardest things to teach or learn in English is idioms, particularly idioms or sayings that come from pop-culture. There are so many of them, so there is no way to systematize them into a teaching program. And you may run across them in a lot of different situations.
So I may post some of these from time to time up here. These are a few that came up in class the other day:
Note that most of these phrases are slightly informal. You might use them with colleagues …Continue

I just came back from Kyrgyzstan teaching at a Pre-Departure Orientation for Afghanistan students on the FLEX program. One of the classes I most enjoyed teaching and that the kids most enjoyed was American Slang class. So from time to time I thought I would post some American slang here.
To start with, it might be useful to talk about school slang and informal terms. So let’s talk about terms for people you might find in an American high school:
First, students are either freshmen, sophomores, juniors or seniors. Students in their …Continue