Posts Tagged ‘Reviews’

I thought so.  Try these with your classes, then:

Student A: How are you?
Student B: Old

Student A: How are you?
Student B: How am I? How should I be?

Student A: How are you?
Student B: How should I be, with my feet?

Student A: How’s your brother?
Student B: Dead

Student A: What’s doing?
Student B: Nothing
A: Nothing?
B: Nothing.

Student A: How was your weekend?
Student B: It should happen to my enemies

Student A: What time is it?
Student B: What am I, a clock?

In case you haven’t guessed they are all from Yiddish, specifically mainly from the surprisingly readable popular linguistics book Born to Kvetch. More good stuff from there coming on TEFLtastic soon.

I’m continuing to learn from and ponder on the information in the Cambridge Grammar of English, and as before testing the matters I’ve been chewing on against your native speaker intuitions would be appreciated (sorry for the very unpleasant mental picture from that metaphor first thing on a Monday morning!)

The (modern?) name for & is “and” (not ampersand)
{ } = chain brackets (they’ve always been squiggly brackets to me!)
< > = diamond brackets
 
American English uses commas before and or but more frequently than British English
 
“Subordinate clauses can be separated by a comma from a preceding main clause, especially when the relation between them might be obscured because the clauses are long.” (pg 842), so “We can get there for around six, if there are no problems with the traffic on the motorway” is okay with or without the comma, despite being in the reverse position of the usual first conditional with a comma
 
Colons are used to indicate subtitles, and to mark a clause in which reasons are given: “We decided against it: it wasn’t lightweight enough”
 
Single quotation marks are becoming more widespread in direct speech
 
Colons may be used to introduce direct speech when it is particularly long
 
There are apostrophes (becoming optional) in “for goodness’ sake” and “for appearance’ sake”
 
In informal writing multiple dashes may be used:
 
“Just got back from Mallorca— we really loved it.”

If punctuation is your thing, or really isn’t you or your students’ thing but should be, here are some links:

Wikipedia on the ampersand

Info on Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss- a funny book on punctuation!

A whole list of punctuation books on Amazon

Punctuation worksheets on ESL Printables.com

And that is all I could find of interest. For classroom activities, one thing that works well, especially with FCE and CAE classes, is for students to take a text that is correct and add spelling and punctuation errors for another team to find.

Another good game is to put a text on the board including punctuation and get them to read out the whole text (including punctuation) over and over as you delete it one word or punctuation mark at a time until they can no longer remember it or the whole text has disappeared.

The game above works well with kids too. A more physical game for kids on the same point is to write up a sentence with one piece of punctuation missing in large letters on the board, and get them to take turns throwing a sticky ball (= sucker ball) at the place they think the punctuation mark should be.

As predicted, I decided that Lessons from Good Language Learners was worth dipping into after all and gave it a half decent review. I think I might have reached the limit with how much obvious-stuff-half-backed-up-by-research I can take with Teacher Language Awareness by Stephen Andrews, though, a book whose premise is that what teachers know and feel about grammar affects their ability to teach the language. Well, duh! (As all the best linguists say)

So, as I got a freebie copy and so feel I have to read all through before I give up on writing a review, I’ve had to ignore its main message and get my amusement and enlightenment where I can. Luckily, there are a few little gems like this from page 26: (more…)

Looking back on my 12 years of teaching English, if it is not just old age speaking I could swear that the first couple of years after I did my initial certificate (CELTA) were a golden age for EFL textbooks. It’s not that they made your lessons any easier or taught the learners the language any better than the textbooks coming out now, but there was just a feeling in the air that books like Cutting Edge and Innovations were the beginning of a new wave of books that was going to fundamentally change the way we teach forever. You could call that period the Modernist Age of Textbooks.

But modernism leads inevitably, it seems, to post-modernism. Since those optimistic days the ELT publishing industry seems to have given up that radical mission as if changing the world was just a hippy dream. Not that the world of textbooks has entirely stood still, but even the most different-looking of the new bunch (e.g. Natural English) only concentrate on what we should teach rather than how we should teach it- which is strange, because the conclusions that lead people to look for new ways to teach have been backed up by more and more research and have gone from controversial to commonly accepted during that time.

The three most fundamental parts of our newly certain knowledge are: (more…)

Not a big enough problem to worry Auntie Alex with, so will deal with this reader enquiry myself:

Some good-looking internet resources on said topic, have no more than skimmed them myself but the sites they are on are well respected.

http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Kilickaya-AutenticMaterial.html

http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/berardo/article.pdf

http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/51/2/144

http://www.amazon.com/Motivational-Strategies-Language-Classroom-D%C3%B6rnyei/dp/0521793777/ref=sr_1_4/002-8179833-2881649?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1185616833&sr=8-4

The last one is the Amazon page of a classic book by a great author with a great name- Zoltan.

Still not loving teaching the 18-20 year olds. Passing on my wisdom is all very well, but I prefer to have some passed back my way too. At least I’m having to research some stuff about Oz (where most of them are going next year) to plan their lessons and so getting some culture that way. Well I guess you could say culture, if you could also say Shane Warne is the Leonardo di Vinci of the antipodes. 

An almost entirely positive point about the classes, though, is the textbook they have chosen for me. Am loving teaching with Face2Face Pre-Intermediate and Face2Face Intermediate (both Chris Redston and Gillie Cunningham, Cambridge University Press). Seems to suit my way of teaching down to the ground. Bizarrely, also gives much more useful language for the IELTS exam than the designated book for that course- being the almost completely pointless book Step Up to IELTS (Vanessa Jakeman and Clare McDowell, also CUP). I also hear daily complaints from the other teachers about Achieve IELTS (Marshall Cavendish). Are there no decent IELTS textbooks out there????

Anyone else like these, hate them or want to know more about them?

Just read a very convincing explanation of why the Warmlet (warms your arse) and Washlet (cleans it) are so popular in Japan, and why the Massagelet must be just around the corner. The theory goes that as western style (non-squatting) toilets became popular at the same time as the video recorder people expected the same amount of functions from both. From the excellent book “Shinohata”, about 20 years of change in a Japanese village.

 That only leaves me with about 120 “Why on earth…?” questions about Japan now.

Hello everybody (Is it also grammatically correct to say “everybody” when you only have two readers, I wonder)

Welcome to the very first entry. I’m sure you will enjoy this blog- it’s gonna be TEFLtastic!*

Before I start my daily rambles, I’d like to write my plans for these pages:

Most of the things I will write about will be connected to teaching and/ or living in Japan, but I will do my best to make all of them also entertaining and informative for those who are neither teaching nor in Japan- if only because I am relying on my friends and family to provide most of the regular clicks to this blog (you have been warned, guys). Should the entertainment or information value not reach these promised standards, please let me know!

With my Reviews Editor (of this site) and writer hat on, I will also have the occasional rant about the state of the English teaching (EFL) publishing industry. I’m thinking of myself as the ESOL Jerry Springer here. If the sheer level of bile and invective doesn’t keep you amused, please feel free to skip these bits. When I’ve calmed down a bit I might also give some useful info on new books and maybe any industry gossip I get hold of.

Basically, it’s a place where we can all let off steam and so continue acting like the saints we really are in the classroom and the rest of our lives, so all comments welcome (except those mentioning my photo)

* TEFLtastic means something that is genuinely fun and useful in the classroom, but is so like something you learn to do when you do your first teacher training that it’s kind of embarrassing to get too excited about. Endless thanks to Matt Noy for this word- I still think of it at least once a week about 7 years after he introduced me to it