Learning English

Sentence Auctions - fun but not without pitfalls!

2009-03-01T14:48:00.003+01:00

My last post described how to play 'sentence auction' with your students. It's a fun way to review grammar points, and students are more likely to remember which errors to avoid if they got burned trying to buy incorrect sentences.

I do this activity quite a lot with my learners at the moment, one reason is that I have to teach the same group for seven hours a day, four days running, and it's a nice way to break up the afternoon session, when the urge to take a nap kicks in. The more I do it, however, the more I realise that some of the sentences I choose for the game could be interpreted in many different ways - sometimes they are not grammatically incorrect after all.

Here's an example:

Im working here for 2 months.

A French speaker would say this instead of 'I've worked here for 2 months', so in the game it's incorrect. But I could interpret the above sentence as meaning, 'I've recently started working here, and I will here for 2 months before going somewhere else'.

In every sentence we utter, there's a ton of meaning that isn't explicitly stated, leaving the hearer to derive whatever meaning they consider to be the most appropriate. Compared to the complexity of the world around us, we will never have enough words or enough time to spell out exactly what we mean, and so we often talk in vague generalities. (I'm getting all philosophical here).

If you were revising 'some' and 'any' would this be right or wrong:

Do you have some money?

If you've taught them that 'some' for positive statements, while 'any' is for questions and negative statements, then it must be wrong. But one might hear this kind of construction all the time among native speakers. If I ask the question, 'so you have any money?', my listener understands that it really is a question, I don't know whether he or she has any money or not. But if I ask, 'do you have some money?', what I'm really saying is, 'could you give me some of it if the answer is yes?'.

On the other hand, 'do you have any bread?' would be correct, but completely stupid if the question was being asked in a bakery. Context is everything, so good judgement is definitely required.

Sentence Auction

2009-02-23T20:40:00.002+01:00

If you don't know this activity, you really should give it a try. It can be great fun and it has quite a lot of pedagogical value because your students are more likely to remember grammmatical pitfalls to avoid after having invested time and (make-believe) money in them. "Once bitten, twice shy" might be an appropriate idiom to explain the learning process.

How to do a sentence auction in your ESL class.

Prepare a handout, or write up on the board twelve sentences. These sentences should have some connection with something that you've been studying recently. In half the sentences, slip in some of the mistakes that your students often make.

If you have done much, many, some, any recently, mix in some sentences like:

*I don't have some money
I have no idea
*I have much baggage

You can lead in to this activity by asking your students if they know what an auction is and if they have ever bought anything at an auction. One easy way to explain what an auction is is to mention the online auction site, ebay. Someone is sure to have an anecdote about buying or selling something on ebay.

Tell your students that you're going to hold an auction, not for works of art or vintage cars, but for English sentences. Explain that some of the sentences are 'genuine', that is, are grammatically correct, and that others are 'fakes'.

Give them a budget, say, 4000€, and tell them that there is a reserve price of 100 and bidding must go up by at least 100€. By the way, you'll probably need to pre-teach this vocabulary.

Put them into pairs and give them ten minutes to decide which sentences they would like to buy. You will then play the role of the auctioneer, reading out each sentence and taking bids. If you are convincing enough when you read them out, some of your students who weren't going to bid will suddenly start having doubts and offering large amounts of money.

Keep a record on the board of which pair buys which sentences and how much was paid.
Only at the end of the auction should you tell them which ones were right and which ones were wrong. The winners are the pair who have bought the most correct sentences without losing money on incorrect sentences. Money lost on unwise purchases could be used as a tie-break.

Play 'number tennis'!

2009-02-17T15:49:00.002+01:00

Here is an exercise in using numbers in English that I learned from a book on improving your mental skills. It's pretty hard for native speakers, so it's a real challenge for your learners. I've seen people with a good level in English and an even better level in mathematics struggle with this exercise.

To introduce the game of number tennis I write an incredibly easy equation on the board:

23 + X = 100

At this point the members of my group normally roll their eyes and look at me in a way that suggests that they think I think they're idiots.

Sometimes I ask them if they did the sum in their own language first and then translated the result. Most people do, and I have to admit that I do the same in French!

When you have the correct answer (77, as if you didn't know) give another number between one and ninety-nine and ask them what number they need to make a total of one hundred.

Playing 'tennis' then, involves putting your learners into pairs and getting one of them to 'serve' numbers to the other person who after giving the right (hopefully) answer returns another number. I referee the game by deciding that a player has taken too long - I shout "out" (how long is too long depends on the level) or if the answer is wrong I just shout no and give the score "15 - love" etc.

You'd be surprised just how hard this is for a learner of English - if the level is low you could start with a total of twenty and then move up by tens. On the other hand, if this exercise doesn't present too much of a challenge, try a more difficult total, say, 250, or if you want to be really sadistic, 573! Mind you, you'll have to be really good yourself in order to referee (umpire?) the matches...

Teaching word origins

2008-12-08T13:37:00.004+01:00

some time ago, I recommended a site called developingteachers.com and told you that their weekly email tips were worth reading. Sign up, I'm sure you'll find something interesting to do with your students.

This week's tip, although a good one, could have been developed more fully, especially for those of us who teach English to speakers of Romance languages. We aren't all in Thailand and Japan, you know!

The teaching tip makes the valid point that learning vocabulary can be more interesting for learners if they know something about the origin of the word. I couldn't agree more, as etymology is some that I love - I could spend hours just flicking through a dictionary or my copy of Brewer's Phrase and Fable. The email goes on to give an A to Z of some interesting words and their origins.

My concern is that although word origins are interesting, they won't necessarily help a learner to recall new vocabulary if they don't create a spark that ignites a chain of thoughts leading to the actual word being summoned up.

For example, the first word on the list is 'avocado'. If my French student was looking for this word in English, he might well remember that the origin of this word was 'testicle' in some south American language, but would that help him to remember the word 'avocado' itself?

When I was a child there was a very famous series of television commercials for a type of Vermouth (fortified wine) featuring the British comedian Leonard Rossiter and the even more well-known Joan Collins (of Dynasty). Research showed that although everyone who had seen the commercial could remember how funny it was, even the exact lines of the two actors, very few could remember which drink it was promoting: was it Martini or Cinzano?

The advertisers had neglected the product in favour of a very funny ad. This could happen to a word with a memorable history.

Going back to example of avocado, if your learners are speakers of Romance languages, they will probably recognise that it's also the Spanish word for 'lawyer'. The Spanish colonialists heard an indigenous word that sounded a bit like 'avocado' (not very much like it in reality) and started to use it. When the fruit travelled the Atlantic to Europe, the French heard the Spanish using the word 'avocado' - (lawyer) and translated it to French: 'avocat' (just like English, 'advocate').

Another word on the list was 'umbrella'. Here is the definition:

Umbrella, appeared in English as early as 1609 (in a letter by
John Donne). In the middle of the 18th century the device was
adopted by the philanthropist Jonas Hanway as a protection
against the London rain.

There is no etymology here, just the date that it entered the English language. It would have been more pertinant, perhaps, to mention that umbrella comes from Italian 'ombrello' which relates to 'shade' not rain, and in fact was used to protect against the sun, not the rain. A French speaker would quickly recognise the word 'ombre' (shade or shadow) in his own language from the word umbrella, in fact, an old word for 'parasol' is 'ombrelle'.

The last word that I find could have been exploited more - at least for Europeans - is 'walnut'. I was surprised to discover that it means 'foreign nut'. But I did know that 'Wales' and 'Wallonie', a region in Belgium, are from a word that the Romans used to describe non-Latin speakers, hence foreigners. These words are also related to the French 'Gaul', as the Norman invaders of Britain had a strange way of pronouncing the letter G, it sounded to them like a W.

Hearing Pidgin English

2008-12-03T21:09:00.002+01:00

Going back to the exercise, 'word wizard' in the book Keep Talking, I was discussing in class the other day which words they would choose that they consider to be the most important. I started writing them up, and added a few words that would make communicating easier:

that thing
yes/no
up/down
man/woman
big/small
here/there
what/where/when/how/who (not why - it can be too abstract)

The learners contributed things like:

give
work
do
have
go
weekend
love
eat
drink
family etc.

So we had about 35 words on the board, and we started trying to make conversation using 'pidgin English'. The conversation went like this:

What work you do?

I do big work: thing go up: thing go down (they make helicopters!)

Where you go weekend?
I go there: do love woman: go eat drink family.

Doing this is exactly what we are NOT supposed to do in class : lower our level of English to that of the learner, ie speaking pidgin English. But it teaches valuable lessons about English:

1. English is essentially quite a simple, monosyllabic language. With just thirty words, I can something like, 'I do no work', which my learners are surprised to discover is grammatically correct, and certainly not pidgin English.

2. We communicate much more with our gestures, facial expressions and intonation than with words themselves (according to some, only 7% of communication is verbal)

3. Perhaps the most important, that English intonation forces the listener to hear pidgin English, that is, as we 'swallow' almost all 'grammatical' words, like prepositions and articles, the listener only hears the 'meaning' words, like verbs, nouns, adjectives.

To demonstrate this last point, I give the learners some sentences to analyse, for example:

do you want to know what he's going to give me?

which could be pronounced (I never do, of course):

jerwanna know wha(t) izgonna gimme?

Or a little more sensible:

On a clear day, you can see the mountains on the horizon.

I point out that in the real world, the prepositions, articles and auxiliaries are so softly pronounced that one only hears:

clear day see mountains horizon

thus turning a perfectly good sentence into pidgin English.

Go to the pronunciation pages at anglais-facile.com for more information about intonation and articulation in English.

Text messages

2008-04-21T09:33:00.002+02:00

Many people are horrified by abbreviations used in text messages, such as 'U R L8', meaning 'you are late'. Is there any justification in the beliefs that our literary tradition is being corrupted and that young people are going to be disadvantaged by their ignorance of correct spelling?

While in no way advocating that this kind of writing should replace the system we have in place today, let me explain why I think that it is not reasonable to be overly-concerned by this phenomenon. There may even be some positive sides to it!

Firstly, the English language is a big mess when it comes to spelling. There are few rules, and even the ones that exist have too many exceptions. Teaching children to read using the phonics method can only help them to read a small number of words, the majority need to be learned by sight. The same for foreign learners of English. Few of my students, including those at intermediate and advanced level can pronounce properly the word 'women'.

Another good example would be words that contain the letters 'ough'- ought, though, through, rough, bough, and thorough are all pronounced differently.

The writer George Bernard Shaw wanted the English alphabet to be revised so that each sound had its own character. He famously argued that 'ghoti' could be pronounced 'fish' in current English, the 'gh' as in 'enough', the 'o' like 'women' [WIMIN] and the 'ti' as in 'station'. His proposed 'Shavian' alphabet was never taken seriously.

Secondly, simplification of spelling has already begun in the United States, largely due to the work of their great lexicographer, Noah Webster. He argued that superfluous (that is, unpronounced) letters could be deleted, like the 'u' in 'colour', 'favour' and the 'ough' in 'through' which is now written 'thru'.

Thirdly, what is so scandalous about using symbols for words anyway? We gape in awe at the complex hieroglyphics of the Egytptians and languages like Chinese only have characters that represent words or ideas, not a phonetic alphabet like ours. Also,the idea of dropping vowels is not new. There are some languages that have an alphabet of only consonants, the reader knows how to pronounce the word from his oral learning of that word. Let's face it, the way I say certain vowels is very different to the way, for example, a New Zealander would say them, so why not drop them altogether?

If we were serious about preserving the written tradition of our language, rather than complaining about the pitiful state of teenagers' writing we should seriously consider revising the ridiculous way we spell our words so that spelling more accurately reflects pronunciation. By so doing, text language would remain in its place where it is useful, and not spill over into other areas of written language.

Oscar Winner - Marion Cotillard

2008-02-27T11:38:00.004+01:00

Congratulations!

just a couple of mistakes in the speech, can you spot them?

thank you so much.

Olivier, what are you did to me

maestro Olivier Dahan

you rocked my life
you truly rocked my life

Thank you so much to picture house for your passion

members of the academy thank you so so much

and well, well , I'm speechless now

I, I

thank you life

thank you love

it is true that there is some angels in this city

thank you so, so much

My job description

2008-01-23T22:04:00.000+01:00

I’m an English Teacher. I teach English to adults in Marseille, in the south of France.
I work with small groups of students, some of whom would like to learn English in order to find a job. English is necessary for jobs in tourism, education and international trade, like Import/Export.

During the day, I prepare lessons by doing research on the internet and using the coursebooks in the centre's library. I prefer doing communication activities rather than grammar.

I sometimes have to attend meetings, which are about planning the courses and discussing new contracts. I have been on training courses in Paris. I take the train early in the morning and stay in a hotel.

I am also an examiner for the diplôme de compétences en langues. I interview candidates and assess them on their linguistic abilities and how they accomplished their tasks.

What's your job? Send me your job description in English and I will correct it before publishing it on my site!

Who wants to be a millionaire?

2008-01-23T14:54:00.000+01:00

I love the TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Do you have it your country?
It's actually great for learning English because the first few questions are really easy - if you are a native speaker. If you're not a native speaker, you might find the first five or so questions quite hard because they are often about local culture or other things that only the natives would know. Proverbs and nursery rhymes feature heavily in those early questions. I've learnt quite a lot about French life and culture by watching WWTBAM in French.

If you are a contestant on the programme, you can imagine how humiliating it would be to get the first question wrong. Well it does happen sometimes as the youtube clip below shows. I'v transcribed the introduction for you, it's good practice to understand American accents.

Notice "word whiskers" like "pretty much" and "I guess" very common in American English

Joining me now is Chase Sampson, a college junior in Nashville Tennessee, and I understand Chase that you flew in last night, you didn’t get here till three in the morning and that you havent slept a wink, huh ?

I pretty much have coffee flowing through my veins right now.

Do you really, but as a college student I think that maybe thats not so rare

Yeah I’m up pretty late mostly i’m kind of er insomniac I guess, but I’m feeling good, I’m feeling good

Good ,good! as long as you’re feeling good and you know the rules and the lifelines, and you’re ready to play , we’re gonna play.

I’m ready

OK, then let’s play !

Jasper Carrot - Brummie Comedian

2008-01-16T13:27:00.000+01:00

If any of you were wondering what my accent is like, here is clip of a famous comedian called Jasper Carrot, who like me is from Birmingham and so has a similar accent (I talk a bit posher, cause I'm a teacher!)

You will learn something about two very well-known stores in Britain, Argos and Woolworths, and what people in the regions think of London.

By the way, pick'n'mix is the self service sweet counter.

'innit' is an even more contracted version of 'isn't it?'

'bloke' is like 'guy' in British English

'nicked' is a slang word for 'stole' or 'stolen'

'spud' is slang for 'potato' but here is used as an insult for an Irishman (they eat a lot of potatoes in Ireland).

Toothcomb??

2008-01-14T22:09:00.000+01:00

Is it possible to comb your teeth? Personally, I brush my teeth, but comb my hair (sometimes). But I recently read an advertising e-mail (not spam, I did request it) urging me to go over the document with a "toothcomb"! Duh!

The English expression that means to examine something very closely, to look at the little details is 'to go over (something) with a fine-tooth comb', that is, a comb with fine teeth, not a comb for your teeth!

I'm not immune to these types of mistakes, so I won't do any more Mickey-taking. Just to say that while looking for examples of 'tooth-comb', I stumbled on this marvelous site by an American professor. Have a look sometime, it's got some great stuff: errors in English.

Improve your vocabulary part 3

2008-01-10T14:47:00.000+01:00

Use crazy associations.

I have been writing quite a lot recently about the linkword method, which involves associating something memorable in your own language to something that sounds similar in the language you are learning. Somebody came up with a great list of French phrases that could be converted in into English. The list appears on a lot of 'joke' websites, but it is in fact the basis of having a great memory, not just for foreign words, but for anything else too. Here are a few examples:

French
Canaille (rogue, rascal) - can I?
ail ou radis? (garlic or radish?) - are you ready?
six tonnes de chair (six tons of flesh) - sit on the chair
guy vomit sur mon nez (guy vomits on my nose) - give me some money
oeuf corse (Corsican egg) - of course

Now the trick here is to create a funny scene in your head that will make it impossible to forget. So a French speaker would imagine a huge six-ton elephant trying to sit on a chair, because to him 'sit on the chair' sounds like 'six tons of flesh' in his language.

You can read more about linkword here

Moses Supposes (again)

2008-01-03T00:19:00.000+01:00

A while ago I suggested learning 'Moses Supposes' to practice the vowel sound 'o'. Well here is the clip of Gene Kelly and co performing it in the classic movie 'Singing in the Rain'. Enjoy!

If you want to learn it, take it slowly and increase the speed only when you have memorised it completely.

five ways to improve your vocabulary - part 2

2007-12-20T20:55:00.000+01:00

What's the word for the instrument you use to open a bottle of wine? It's a corkscrew. We saw this word in the previous post. If you are a native French speaker, you would think that this word is an old anglo-saxon word that has no connection with French. You would be wrong. According to my dictionary 'cork' has come from French 'écorce', the letter Cs having changed to hard 'k' sounds. And I would bet, although I'm not 100% sure, that 'screw' stemmed from 'écrou', although the meaning has changed somewhat.

This knowledge helps you connect something familiar (if you are a French-speaker) to something that was before quite unfamiliar - écorce - écrou - corkscrew. Being aware of the roots of a word can help you enormously in your quest to build your vocabulary. Another thing that will help you is to learn some of the prefixes and suffixes that have come from Latin or Greek. There are some examples here.

five ways to improve your vocabulary - part 1

2007-12-20T20:33:00.000+01:00

Many of you write to me saying that you lack vocabulary and would like to know what is the best way to improve. Others say that they need English for a specific purpose, like business, and request lessons on business vocabulary. still others need to travel, so need travel vocabulary.

So everyone has their own reason for learning a language, and this reason is the most important motivation you can have for wanting to learn. If you need English to go on holiday to Las Vegas, there is simply no point in spending time learning Sillicon Valley business idioms.

I'm going to give you five ways to help you retain the new words that you learn during your study periods. Be aware, however, that all of these techniques need lots of revision for them to be effective, and like it or not, repetition is still the best way to fix a word or expression in your head.

Number One:

Link words that go together and review often. I started the mind map below based on the theme of wine, a favourite subject amongst my French students. I test their vocabulary by asking them what the English word is for the instrument they use to open the bottle. Usually they don't know the word 'corkscrew', and it is a difficult word for them to retain as it doesn't bear any immediate similarity to any word in French. By linking familiar words to less familiar ones, we have a better chance of understanding and, eventually, retaining them for later use. So on the mind-map we have 'bottle' which is recognisable as coming from 'bouteille' in French, and next to it the word 'cork'. If I link the verb 'to open' with 'cork' and then add 'corkscrew', you could probably guess that it is the French word for 'tirebouchon' (if you're a French-speaker, of course, as most of my readers are).

Try this technique with a group of vocabulary that you need to learn. Each branch of the mind map should have words that relate to each other - so 'living room' would link to 'sofa' 'coffee table' 'television' and other things that are found in a living room. Do a personal 'brainstorming' with a dictionary to see how many words you can come up for a given subect.

DevelopingTeachers.com

2007-12-20T00:19:00.000+01:00

Some months ago I signed up to receive teaching tips from a site called developingteachers.com. Unfortunately, I was so preoccupied by other things, I never really read them. This week however, they sent me a gem of a teaching idea that I think I will use a lot in the future. If you are a language teacher, this is a good site to visit and will give you other ideas than the ones you're probably already using from onestopenglish.com or the not very good englishtogo.com.

Anyway, this week's tip was about using the latest trend of making lists of everything, like Amazon's listmania. This can be an interesting variation on the usual ranking exercises - students have to agree on a list of the world's most important inventions or the greatest citizens of whatever country they come from. If you have a list like this from a magazine, students can agree or disagree with the choices given, and suggest alternatives.

It's a great idea, so pop along to developingteachers.com and subscribe to the newsletter, it won't be the worst teaching information you get in your inbox every week.

Curiosity killed the cat

2007-12-12T11:58:00.001+01:00

We got a kitten this summer for our daughter. Like all cats, he just can't control his curiosity. He can't see an open door without going through it (and thus getting locked in cupboards, the cellar etc) and he can't see a box without jumping in it.

This typical cat behaviour gave rise to the expression 'curiosity killed the cat', probably from a time when inquisitive cats would fall down wells or get mangled in farm machinery. It is used as a warning, especially to children, not to pry into things that are not their business.

My advice: be very curious about words, word origins and expressions, but when trying to understand difficult grammar, remember - curiosity killed the cat!

Learn this if you dare!

2007-12-11T21:27:00.000+01:00

As you probably know from reading this blog, I'm a fan of using nursery rhymes to practise your intonation and pronunciation, as well as picking up more vocabulary and interesting things about the history and traditions of a country.

Well here's one that's just great for getting to grips with those 'swallowed' little words. I'll get around to recording it one day so you can listen to it. Remember that you should stress only the important words - nouns, verbs and adjectives, not the 'grammatical' words like articles, prepositions or determiners.

The House that Jack Built

This is the house that Jack built

This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the man all tattered and torn that kissed the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the priest all shaven and shorn that married the man all tattered and torn that kissed the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the cock that crowed in the morn that waked the priest all shaven and shorn that married the man all tattered and torn that kissed the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the farmer sowing his corn that kept the cock that crowed in the morn that waked the priest all shaven and shorn that married the man all tattered and torn that kissed the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

this is the horse and the hound and the horn that belonged to the farmer sowing his corn that kept the cock that crowed in the morn that waked the priest all shaven and shorn that married the man all tattered and torn that kissed the maiden all forlorn that milked the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built

English word of the day

2007-12-07T10:04:00.000+01:00

While surfing the net looking for things to write about learning English, I often come across ESL sites that have a 'word of the day' or 'word of the week' box. Some online dictionaries put up free word of the day scripts that you can put on your own site or blog. I did once think about doing it, thinking that it would be a good way for you to improve your vocabulary.

The only problem, however, was that most, if not all, the words that came up were ones that I'd never heard of. This is great for me - as a native English speaker they help me to expand my knowledge of English. But how useful would these words be to a foreign learner of English? Even if you have an extremely advanced level, these words have limited usefulness because no-one ever uses them.

Michael Lewis makes this point in his book 'The Lexical Approach'. He noted that books aimed at proficiency level concentrate on words that even native speakers never use. I have trouble completing the exercises in these books because these words don't figure in my vocabulary. Since when have 'advanced' or 'proficient' been synonyms with 'obscure' or 'useless'?

Having an advanced level in a foreign language doesn't mean knowing a lot of words that even the natives don't know, rather, it means using the same language that the natives use, including slang, idioms and word-plays. And yes, in English that means understanding that awful corrupted, vulgar version of English called 'American'!

I've had hate mail from outraged teachers accusing me of discrediting the profession by teaching things like 'gonna' and 'watcha', but that's another story for another day.

big bang

2007-10-14T20:26:00.000+02:00

Now I've decided that 'that' is my number one important word, I need to think what other words would make up my four-word vocabulary. I've been thinking about the differences between how a baby would develop a vocabulary and an adult. A baby will certainly add words to his central 'that' based on his immediate environment, and a mind map might look like this:

Of course, the baby won't know the 'category' words - food, object, person, thing - just the things themselves, but a lot more essential words could be added to those two main branches and the following sub-branches. An adult, on the other hand, is perfectly capable of categorising crucial vocabulary in order to make a logical sequence of related words. The starting point of an adult's 'big bang' (I call it this because everything 'explodes' from a central point) could be simply his name.

We can keep adding to this essential vocabulary - which are key words, not grammatical ones like do you/are you/my name is/how old are you etc.

English- your most important words part 2

2007-10-11T08:46:00.000+02:00

Way back in May I wrote about an exercise that involved choosing your four most important words. I had some interesting feedback, especially from a fellow teacher in England who said that her students chose words like boring, Macdonalds, want amongst others.

I suggested that verbs probably wouldn't be a priority if you could only use four words. This is because verbs are action or doing words, as we are taught in primary school. So that means that you can use a gesture to indicate most of them. How many of you teachers have never done a lesson on the present progressive using miming and the question "what I am doing?". The students have to answer, "you're riding a bike", you're having a shower" etc. You get the point.

If you were travelling in Mongolia and nobody around spoke a word of English and you couldn't speak a word of Mongolian, what would be your word number one to learn? I think we can learn a valuable lesson from babies. Generally a baby's first word is mama or papa - not that useful for travelling adults!

But what comes next? Baby wants something that he can see, but doesn't have any vocabulary - so very quickly he learns an incredibly useful word that he can use in conjunction with pointing - THAT!

Now there might ten different translations for the word 'that' in Mongolian, I have no idea. Even so, if you choose one of them that relates to objects or things in general, then you can go into a shop and ask for something to eat - something essential for your survival.

choosing your most important words

2007-05-15T10:06:00.000+02:00

There's an interesting exercise in the book Keep Talking by Friederike Klippel (Cambridge) called 'word wizard'. Each student is to choose the four words they consider to be the most important if no other words could be used. Which four words would you choose? The aim of the exercise is to try have a conversation with other students, thereby learning their four words a building a vocabulary of up to sixty-four words, assuming that there are sixteen students and no-one chooses the same words.

In reality, people have very similar ideas about which words they would choose. Verbs are very popular. So time and again we get choices like be, have, go, want. If had to choose four verbs, maybe eat, drink, sleep, do would be the best for basic survival.

Are these really the most useful words? Which ones would you choose?

In my next post, I'll tell you why I don't think choosing verbs as your most important words is a good idea.

learning words that are relevant to you

2007-05-09T12:56:00.000+02:00

If you really want to make the most of your English lessons, it's your responsiblity to learn as many words as you can in your own time. If your average lesson is made up of different people continually asking, "how do say ..... in English?" then you are losing valuable time that could be spent making conversation - real communication.

Don't treat your teacher as a walking dictionary. As I've said before, you should be learning word groups that are important to you so that you have something relevant to say in class.

You can do this by making mind-maps
or by using flash cards to memorise key words and expressions.

Don't expect your teacher to know what words are important to you. If you are serious about your language learning, take the responsibility of building your own vocabulary and then your teacher will have time to work on your pronunciation and sentence structure, as well as the all-important fluency.

apostrophe misuse

2007-04-29T22:08:00.000+02:00

In France, in order to make words look more anglo-saxon, there is the habit of sticking an apostrophe and an 's' at the end of words. A shop selling English furniture is thus called 'Interior's'.

I would like to inform my French readers, however, that the situation is not better, perhaps even worse, back home in England. Which is even more pathetic, given that in a country where English is the native language, a large proportion of the population has absolutely no idea when and how to use the apostrophe.

's is known as the anglo-saxon genitive and is used to denote possession - the 's goes at the end of the possessor, not the possessed:

The manager's car = the car that belongs to the manager

When a word is already a plural, you put just an apostrophe after the final s, without adding a second s:

the managers' cars = the cars that belong to the managers

There are even websites that try to combat the misuse of the apostrophe. Take a look at the following for example:

www.apostrophe.fsnet.co.uk

There are some exceptions to the apostrophe rule, however. These would be in situations where adding an 's' to make a plural would be confusing. For example, we often talk about a list of do's and don'ts(a list of things to do and not to do).
If we simply added an 's' to 'do' to make it a plural you would get 'dos' which looks like an incorrect spelling of the third person, 'does' or the abbreviation of 'disk operating system'.
Also, initials can take an apostrophe in order to avoid making the plural 's' look like one of the intials. For example, it would be OK to write the plural of CD, CD's. If there were no apostrophe, it would look like three initials, CDS.

I don't know if my exceptions here are officially recognised, so if you strongly disagree, let me know!

T-shirt talk

2007-04-29T22:00:00.000+02:00

If you walk down mainstreet in any French town, just about every other person you pass will be wearing a t-shirt with a slogan in English on it. Most of the wearers are oblivious to the fact that the message they are sharing with the world is either nonsense, full of mistakes or downright obscene.

One girl I saw recently had a top that read, 'young hot mistress for erotic massage' followed by a telephone number. There's no excuse for not knowing what it meant, for 'erotic' and 'massage' are both words that exist in French. It seems that the fact it was written in English makes it acceptable, even though the slogan is in effect really saying 'I'm a prostitute'.

I mention this because it reminds of the time back in the eighties when everyone was wearing t-shirts with Japanese writing on them. I shudder to think now what I might have been broadcasting to anyone who could understand Japanese. Perhaps a Japanese person could read on my t-shirt, 'stay away from this jerk, he's a complete loser' or worse!

After seeing the stupid slogans in english that people wear in France, I will always think twice before buying a T-shirt with anything written in a language I don't understand

Why I've become a YouTuber

2007-04-29T21:52:00.000+02:00

If you are a regular visitor to my site, anglais-facile.com, you will have noticed that I have started making videos and uploading them on to Youtube.com. Youtube is just fantastic for learning English, you can watch video blogs in order to hear all kinds of English accents, you can listen to your favourite songs in English and learn so much about what's going on in popular culture, and now you can even watch me as I try to answer questions that have been sent in by you, my dear readers.

I use Youtube because it's free! I would have to upgrade my site if I wanted to put all that video on it, and that would be expensive. Also, I haven't got a clue about how to put video on a web page, so I use youtube's technology. All I need to do is make a video with my webcam, upload it to youtube and then paste the link code into my site.

Anyway, I hope you like the videos, some of them are admittedly pretty boring, but it's probably better that you can watch and listen as well as read.

learning everyday words

2007-03-10T16:09:00.000+01:00

When I first arrived in France, the first thing I had to do was build a kitchen in the apartment where we were living. It was at this time that I realised just how many everyday words I hadn't learned whilst trying to study French in England. I would find myself in some hardware store gazing around wondering how to say "emulsion paint" or "sealant" or "washers". Even a simple word like "paint" can generate dozens of possiblities: vinyl, matt, eggshell, gloss, paintbrush, roller, paint tray, dilute, stir, drying time, undercoat, sandpaper, filler, finish, washable, etc.

If you are planning to go live in an foreign country, then start thinking about the possible word groups you are likely to encounter. Have a look around your kitchen and see what words you may need when abroad - not just the obvious ones like names of food items, but others. I know a lot of French people who have an excellent level in English but have never learned words like "sweep" "broom" "mop up" or "do the hoovering"!

If you are going to collect word groups like housework or DIY, then you could try making mindmaps. Go to my mind map pages for more information.

The Understanding / Using Divide

2007-02-20T10:28:00.000+01:00

Something really interesting happened during a lesson last week. I played a cassette to a student to test his understanding of spoken English. On the cassette, a lady said, "I won't be back until eight O'clock". I stopped the cassette, and asked the student what she said. Quite confidently, he replied, "she said she will return home at eight O'clock."

He had by and large understood the message. But he couldn't recall the words used. This is because an expression like "I won't be back until eight" doesn't figure in his active vocabulary, and can't be translated literally into French. He nevertheless got the gist.

This shows the gap between what we understand and what we are able to produce. I don't know how teachers could accelerate the process of transforming passive understanding into active usage. After all, that should be our job. It seems to me that massive exposure to language along with lots of practice is the only solution, but someone studying two hours a week with little time for homework is surely not going to make rapid progress.

The stormy history of English and French

2007-01-29T10:20:00.000+01:00

All my students have heard me talk about a book that I think everyone learning English or French should read. It's called "honni Soit Qui Mal Y Pense" by a great linguist, Henriette Walter.

It's the history of the two languages and how they developed in relation to each other. I've been criticised in the past for saying that English is just a dialect of French, it isn't, I know, but French has had such a profound impact on English that it is important to be aware of it. You will find it so much easier to retain and recall words if you know that they are simply modified French words.

Walter's attitude is refreshing - nowhere does she complain about the amount of English words used in French today, rather, she celebrates the cultural and linguistic exchange that has taken place for over a thousand years.

I don't really like it when I hear French people say "sur-booké" or "faire un meeting", but that's life - just like in English we still say "coup d'état" or "chic". Our ability to communicate ideas can only improve by having so many more words to use!

If you are French and want to know more about your language and English, buy this book. It's a pity it doesn't exist in English, but even if your French is not so good, you will find tons of interesting stuff about word origins etc.

Thoughts on "The Lexical Approach"

2007-01-02T13:44:00.000+01:00

When I studied to become an English teacher, one of my instructors talked about a book that had had a considerable impact on the world of EFL. Called "The Lexical Approach", this book by Michael Lewis challenges a lot of the conventional wisdom in English language teaching.
Lewis summarises the book himself with the statement that "language is grammaticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar." What does this rather obscure sentence mean? Basically that the language came first, and grammar is our attempt to find order in language. If this is the case, then it is wrong to start with grammar and expect our students to "fill the gaps" by adding vocabulary.
Think of it: if you did stupid exercises in your French class like "où est le singe?" - "le singe est dans l'arbre" (where is the monkey? - the monkey is in the tree) you will see that Lewis is right - we don't need possible sentences, but probable ones.
In class I still hear students say "my tailor is rich". Why? Because they learned it in school, and never having found an opportunity to use it a real context, they just say it to me like it's part of an interesting conversation.
The Lexical Approach can make depressing reading if you are really gung-ho on grammar bashing - but never fear - he does recommend drilling, lexical drilling, that is, which can be rather fun with the right groups.
I bought the book just after my CELTA course, which wasn't the best time - it left me a bit confused about what makes a good EFL teacher. But if you have been teaching for a while, it's well worth a look.

Jonathan's fake word origins

2006-12-27T15:18:00.000+01:00

I sometimes like to impress my students by telling them interesting stories about the origins of words. I like to think that a funny story will help learners to retain the word better. Well, I have a confession to make. Some of these etymological adventures are simply the product of my (or others') imagination. For example, it is a commonly believed in England that the word "butterfly" comes from reversing the first letter of "flutter" and "by". It would be lovely if it were true. It's not. Butterfly is a pure Germanic word. Not interesting at all. To see a "butterfly fluttering by" is a much more romantic and effective way of remembering the word. Another one that is completely of my own invention is the word "bee". I decided that because the English word "apron" came from French "naperon", the "n" becoming attached to article -"an apron", that the French word "abeille" could have easily become "a bee". Utterly false. I would like to take tbis opportunity to apologise to my students for all this misleading information. At least I have a vivid imagination! The one about "apron" is true, however.

Are women better than men at learning languages?

2006-12-15T13:40:00.000+01:00

What’s the key to success in learning a foreign language? Surely it’s a genuine desire to communicate with other people. I can’t think of another valid reason. That’s why in general women are better than men at learning languages. If you’re a man and you want to learn a language, I’m going to tell you why you will find it more difficult than a woman and what you can do about it.

I’m probably going to be accused of stereotyping men and women here, but time and time again studies have shown that generally, (there are always exceptions) men score higher in maths tests and women score higher in language tests. I’m not a scientist, and I don’t want to bore you with scientific detail, but my experiences as a teacher pretty much confirm the scientists’ view.

When I’m teaching a conversation class, it’s instantly obvious who are going to make the fastest progress because these are the ones who quickly get involved by asking questions. And more often than not, it’s the female members of the group that ask the most questions.

Women are simply more interested in human beings than men. They genuinely mean it when they ask “how are you?” Being wives and mothers may have something to do with it, I mean, they are conditioned by society to be the ones that care. Men, on the other hand, are less interested in people and more interested in things, notably, cars, computers, gadgets, etc.

If you are man reading this article, you have to get out of your macho cave and learn to be more interested in people. And swallow your pride when it comes to making mistakes. Women have fewer complexes about committing errors, because the important thing for them is building relationships. We all learn by making mistakes, it’s a natural part of the process. Learning a language is not a competition – men sometimes see their limitations as a “defeat” so they prefer not to speak at all. Giving up the idea that your are in a competition to see who's the the best would be a good start for a lot of men.

Vocabulary, Vocabulary, Vocabulary

2006-12-11T17:35:00.000+01:00

What made Shakespeare the greatest writer in English literature? His stories were good, for sure - but a lot of them were simply re-workings of historical events or legends. His rhythm and rhyme were good, too - but everyone else was doing the same. What made Shakespeare great, and what can make you great too, was the size of his...

Vocabulary! It is believed that the average person is able to recognise between 10 and 15 thousand words. Shakespeare used 35,000 words in his plays and sonnets, thus making him the ultimate communicator in history.

What are the benefits you can derive from improving your vocabulary?

1 Greater understanding means being better informed. So it's easy to read comic books but a bit more tricky reading "the Times". Want the edge on your colleagues or competitors? You must be at ease with your language, and have a good understanding. it can be embarrassing and even destructive to find yourself in a situation where everyone is using a word that you don't know. Knowledge is power!

2 Add spice to your public speaking. Using the same words over and over gets boring. Having a large vocabulary will always keep your audience keen. Be careful though, using long words just to impress will always have the opposite effect, people will switch off if they think you are being pompous.

3. Get your message across more effectively. Many people believe that the word 'synonym' means 'another word for the same thing'. This is not true. If two words meant exactly the same thing, we wouldn't need them. Synonyms are similar words, but not the same. Having a good range of synonyms can add not only richness to your speech, but also make you communicate more effectively. The nuances that you create in your choice of vocabulary will hit the nail on the head as far as your listeners are concerned. They will go away knowing exactly what the message was, not just some vague idea.

The best way to improve your vocabulary is get a thesaurus and start adding words to your active vocabulary. Using mind maps is great way to organise your ideas: write a word in the middle of blank sheet of paper and use colors and images to build associations. If you've never used mind maps before, now's the time to get started. You can see some examples at my site.

Using Flashcards in language learning

2006-12-07T17:14:00.000+01:00

You may be tempted to invest in some language-learning software that you have seen advertised. Don’t be fooled by the advertiser’s claims. All that glitters is not gold – so it may have lots of fancy colours and use all the latest technology, but is it actually more effective than other, more simple methods? In my opinion, no. Here’s why the humble flash card out-performs software every time:

1. They’re cheap
Go to any stationer’s and buy some blank cards, the size of a business card. They cost next to nothing. A language learning CD-ROM will cost you at least 20 dollars, perhaps as much as two hundred!

2. You can use them anywhere
I started learning French when I was living in London and travelling to work by bus. Even if you do have a laptop computer, try getting it out when you’re the last one the bus or train and there’s only standing room left! With a small pile of flash cards in my pocket, I could be learning French anywhere, anytime – even while walking down the street.

3. You won’t get eyestrain
Even while writing this article, my eyes are starting to hurt. I don’t know many people who can honestly say they like reading off a computer screen. With your flash cards you can create the right learning environment for you, whether it’s at your desk, on the sofa, or out in the garden.

4. They don’t break down, and they never go out of date.
I still use mine to remind me of things that I’ve forgotten, even after several years. They have an unconditional lifetime guarantee – just don’t lose them! And you’ll never have any “down time” because your computer’s being repaired.

5. They work!
The first set of flash cards you make should be single words. So you write the word on one side and the translation on the other. Test yourself until you have a good vocabulary of about a hundred words. Then you are ready to use your flash cards to learn complete sentences. Use the words that you have already learned to make sentences to remember. Be sure to ask someone who speaks the language you want to learn to check your flash cards for errors – you don’t want to practise mistakes!

Start learning those words with flash cards and you’ll soon be ready to join a real language class. Once you’ve got a few words and sentences, you’ll really benefit from making conversation with native speakers – it’s up to you to start speaking!

Australia

2006-12-06T15:53:00.000+01:00

Another form of English is that of Australia, a commonwealth country that still has the Queen of England as its head of state. Australia was at one time the world's biggest open prison, the British would send their unwanted criminals there, many of whom never returned (even after serving their sentence, the chances of surviving the return trip were so slim it was better to stay put).

Many convicts were Londoners or Irish immigrants, and the Australian accent today still has traces of these influences. Other European immigrants later on have made a contribution to the accent and intonation too.

Australian has its own words and expressions, some of which have been exported successfully to the rest of the English speaking world. However, some that are claimed to be Australian are highly doubtful, for example, rhyming slang has certainly come from Cockney London.

Some of my favourite words that are commonly known in Europe and elsewhere are "smoothie" for milkshake, "Sheila" for woman (Sheila was once a very common first name), "tucker" for food, although "tuck shop" exists in English - a kind of snack bar found in schools. A "Matilda" is a sleeping roll, from where the song "waltzing matilda" has its origins. "Walkabout" was first used to describe the lone journey a young aborigine made as part of his initiation into adulthood, but now refers to any kind of absense - "he's gone walkabout".

The first settlers in Australia also used the aborigine words for the new things they discovered: kangaroo, koala, wombat, boomerang, didgeridoo, etc.

Here is a link to a website that lists some common words and expressions in Australian English. Some of the words listed for me can't be sure to be 100% Australian, but don't throw a wobbly, it's just for fun!

Dictionary of Australian slang

do you speak Hinglish?

2006-12-05T11:02:00.000+01:00

The largest community of English speaking people is not American, as one would believe, but India. English and Hindi have been happily mingling together for a centuries now, just like Fench and English did after the Norman invasions.

The fact that there are more people speaking English in India than Britain, America, Canada and Australia combined raises an important question about the way we teach grammar "rules" to foreign students.

If one billion people find it normal to say "are you liking your meal?", what right do we have to say it's wrong? Grammar is merely an attempt to find order in what we say, it wasn't there before language itself. So the majority rule applies - if most people say it - it must be right.

Even back in England, many people (myself included) say "I was, you was, he was, we was, they was", paying little regard to whether they should use "was" or "were".

English has also benefited from the influence of Indian speakers of English with the many news words that they have given us. There's an interesting article on the BBC about "Hinglish".

Hinglish article

Learning American English

2006-12-04T17:10:00.000+01:00

Which English do you want to speak? There isn't one, but several Englishes that people all over the world use to communicate. American English certainly dominates, being the language of Hollywood, computing and aviation. Some would even go as far as calling their language "American", and why not? It has several important differences with my English, British. But for a foreign learner to say that they speak English and American is exaggerating somewhat. The biggest differences between British and American English are vocabulary items, just like there are regional differences in any language.

A French speaker is likely to get confused when there is the added problem of "false friends".
A good example is the British word "chips". Here in the UK, chips are fried potatoes, generally cut a little thicker than their American equivalents, "French Fries", which are not French at all, but Belgian. However, in France we use the word "chips" for thin slices of fried potato that come in a packet and are eaten as apetisers or aperitif.

A French teenager may be very proud of his new "baskets"! I would use a basket to bring home my vegetables from the market (panier). The French word has come from the sport basketball, while the British say "trainers" (shoes for training) while the Americans say "sneakers" (not to be confused with "Snickers", the chocolate bar). "To sneak" means to walk about silently, as if you were somewhere you shouldn't be.

As for grammar, the good news is that Americans use less and less the dreaded present perfect - so you have one less thing to worry about. Words like "just" "ever" and "already" can be used with the past simple, whereas in English it's the present perfect.

British: have you already seen this film?
American: did you already see this film?

The British generally have no problem with American English as they are used to watching American films (or movies if you prefer). The Yanks, on the other hand may have a few difficulties understanding a Briton, especially if he uses slang words.

More about Nursery Rhymes

2006-12-02T23:39:00.000+01:00

Children's songs and nursery rhymes are a great way to discover the history and culture of a country. They are easy to find on the internet and some sites even have midi files so you can hear the melody.

Going back to one of my favourite subjects - that of the influence of Norman French on the English language, I discovered some interesting words in my daughter's book of Nursery Rhymes.

One had two words that rhyme nicely : to apprise and assizes. Both these words have the sound /ai/ that sounds like "eye".

the first word means "to make something known, give information". If you are French speaker you will see that it is derived from the past participle of the verb "apprendre" - to learn/teach.

The second word is still in use in Scotland, and is a legal term that comes from French "assise" which means "seated" or "sitting" and refers to a court of law. The English equivalent, "a sitting" is slightly more general, it can be a legal hearing, but also what someone does when they are posing for a portrait or photograph.

I also found the word "comfit". If I pronounce it, you would find it hard to find its French root. But the context of the nursery rhyme would help you - it talks about different types of food found on board a ship, and is immediately followed by "apples". So it is the anglicised version of "confit" which is a kind caramelised fruit or other sweet. In French it can also be used for meat, in the South West "confit de canard" (duck) is a traditional dish.

Moses Supposes his Toeses are Roses

2006-11-29T15:30:00.001+01:00

I discovered this silly rhyme in my daughter's book of nursery rhymes - it's said to be traditional, but was made famous in the film "singing in the rain" with Gene Kelly.

For those of you that have a good level in English, or are teaching English, this

is a very good pronunciation exercise for the diphthong:

It's also a good way to demonstrate stress patterns in English, in this rhyme it is the "o" sound that is stressed, which is normal, for dipthongs are hard to contract, or swallow as my students prefer to say.

Here is the ryhme in full:

Moses supposes his toeses are roses

But Moses supposes erroneously

for nobody's toeses are posies of roses

As Moses supposes his toeses to be.

Throw away your English cassettes

2006-11-27T22:53:00.000+01:00

If you want to hear real people speaking real English, use the net to find MP3 or other sound files to download. I've been told that a lot of people have trouble downloading clips from the BBC, that's too bad because there are loads of good video and audio clips. Try CNN for American English.

If you want to hear what my Birmingham accent sounds like, I found this interview with one of Birmaingham's most famous sons, Ozzy Osbourne. Yes Brum is the capital of heavy metal, with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin coming from the region. This will be hard work to understand but give it a try. Click on the link:
Ozzy Osbourne interview

Getting used to the right accent

2006-11-25T17:20:00.000+01:00

If you are attending a class that uses a course like Headway, English File or any other for that matter, the listening material generally uses speakers of British English. Not only British English, but a particular accent called "RP" - "received pronunciation". I'm not sure about the history of the name "received pronunciation" but it certainly isn't the most common accent in Britain - it reflects more a social class - that of the middle to upper class living in the Oxford/Cambridge/London triangle. For me, it reminds me of the BBC announcers from the thirties and forties. Who speaks like that these days?

Even more disturbing is the lack of material for American English. I don't know if it's different in the States, but the only courses that are based on American English I've seen are produced by Oxford University Press! Even if I don't like to admit it, American English is the English that dominates the international community.

The English phonemes that are given in the international Phonetic alphabet seem to based on received pronunciation too. I believe this because of the discussions I've had with American colleagues who pronounce a lot of sounds differently to me and agree that some of their sounds are not represented in the IPA.

Admittedly, Headway Intermediate does have a "guess my accent" exercise, where six people describe their capital city. As a native speaker, though, I can tell you that I couldn't recognise the Australian accent, the Irish speaker speaks so slowly it sounds nothing like the Irish people I know, the Scotsman has an incredibly posh Edinburgh accent that wouldn't be understood in Glasgow, and the Londoner has a RP accent that makes him sound more like Tony Blair than a "real" Londoner. I know that Cockney isn't the only London accent, but it would be worth using it in listening materials.

There is a good book for American English called "Great Ideas". Unfortunately it is 25 years old and sounds and looks a little dated. I use the cassette on its own just for listening practice.

Ask your students where they will be using their English skills and you will get a variety of answers. Among the people I'm currently working with, I hear the need to communicate in English with Arabs from the middle east, to attend meetings with Italian colleagues, to negotiate contract with Russians, in fact, just about every nationality except native British or Americans!

Have a look on the net for interviews in MP3 format that you can burn to CD and play to your students. If you can think of a famous person with an accent that your students will need to understand, you should be able to find something to download.
I'll do some research myself and post any useful links to the blog.

Things we should teach our students but don't

2006-11-22T22:52:00.000+01:00

Here is an invitation to anyone who might happen to be reading: send me your suggestions for things that we really should be teaching our students, but somehow they just never come up in the syllabus. "Ay up me duck" is certainly one of them if you are considering visiting Nottinghamshire.
On a more serious note, I've never seen the expression, "I could do with..." in a coursebook. Try translating that word for word into your students' language!
Regional variations can also cause problems: The English use the word "uncanny" to describe something unexplainable, "an uncanny knack" or "an uncanny resemblance". But in Scotland and the North East, the opposite "canny" means "good", "pretty", "nice" or just about anything positive.
I have at times caught myself explaining things that really shouldn't be explained, like why we say "once", "twice" but "three times". I've wasted time telling them that in the past people used to say "thrice". Worse still, how about killing a few seconds by telling them that O'clock means "of the clock" or that "you" is a formal address, like "vous" in French and that the intimate form, like "tu" was "thou". Now that's something they are going to use everyday! Maybe this pretentious nonsense comes from being fed up with correcting "I live in Marseille since ten years".

Going back to "ay up me duck" (my Brummy equivalent is "alright our kid?"), "me" is in fact "my". Students really ought to be able to understand crucial survival phrases like, "where's me tea?"

"Tea" is another good example. Only the rich had time on their hands for "teatime", whilst for most working class families "tea" means "evening meal" or "dinner". When I was at school, the women who served the food at lunch time were called "dinner ladies". I bet there isn't a region in Britain that calls them "lunch ladies"!

any more suggestions?

We're teaching, but are you learning?

2006-11-19T21:45:00.000+01:00

I'm always asking questions without really providing any answers, and here's yet another one: a child's acquistion of language is not rapid - he or she spends 18 months only listening, then another couple of years mastering the sounds required, then another 6 to 8 years building a respectable vocabulary. Wouldn't it better for any adult wishing to learn a new language to do the same, rather than joining a language class straight away? Why not set a goal to learn 10 words a day for a year, listen to the radio every day for one hour or more, and start reading children's books in your chosen language? When you eventually did start your lessons, you would already have a "feel" for the language, your ears would be tuned in, and your success more assured, even if you are unlucky enough to get a crap teacher like me!

Personally, I don't really like being treated like a walking dictionary. What job satisfaction do I get from telling people how to say a word in English? If my learners already had a reasonable vocabulary, I could then help them to get their structure right. My own language learning experience backs this up, although we all learn differently. I hated going to class, and hated even more doing grammar exercises from the book I had bought. But I liked watching TV, and I liked reading my daughter's books, and I liked chatting to people I met. And you know what? The biggest compliment I know is when people say to me: "if I could speak English as well you speak French, I would be really happy". I must be doing something right, then...

teaching "real" English

2006-11-17T23:31:00.000+01:00

In class, do you slow down your speech and try to articulate a little more precisely than you do when talking to other native speakers? I do, because I know that otherwise my students will have trouble following me. After all, I reason, if they don’t understand anything, they will have accomplished nothing as far as learning is concerned.

By doing this, your students are going to have a big shock if eventually they get to try out their English in real-world situations, that is, outside the classroom. For English speakers who are not EFL professionals are not so considerate toward non-native speakers. They will continue at their normal pace and expect everyone to keep up. So if your students are used to y o u ...s p e a k i n g ...s l o w l y... a n d ... d e l i b e r a t e l y ... l i k e ... t h i s...they won’t have a cat-in-hell’s chance of understanding the New York taxi driver or the Scottish barman they meet on their travels.

So is it better to babble on in your normal voice? I thought about this when a student of mine had a fairly typical grammar problem with the “to” infinitive. She would regularly say, “*I want go”, forgetting the particle. I decided that since corrections didn’t seem to work, I would show her what it sounds in “real” English: “I wanna go”. In the real world, native speakers don’t pay any attention to the fact that the little word “to” belongs to the following verb, and routinely attach it to “want” so it becomes “wanna”. If you taught your students “wanna” first, they would simply add the verb they want and forget about the grammar rules. The advantage of this is that they will at the same time be practising spoken English the way natives use it.

I have the advantage as a language teacher to have two small children who are learning my language, English, and their mother’s, French. It is nothing short of miraculous that my daughter can understand, at the age of three, when I say “what are you going to do?”; because what actually comes out of my mouth is more like “watcha gonna do?” Only when she learns to read will she realise that there are actually six words in the question and not three. But that’s of little importance to her while she’s mastering the spoken word, and it should be the same for your students.

Only rarely do adults say that they need writing skills more than speaking, and yet we still put too much emphasis on the written word. It’s time for language teachers to teach English in a way that is best going to serve their students in life, and not treat language as a purely academic exercise.

The All-Blacks are in France

2006-11-17T16:09:00.000+01:00

After giving the English a good hiding, the All-Blacks have come to France to demonstrate their current superiority in the Rugby world. I like Rugby, but don't spend a lot of time watching sport,and have no intention of starting writing about it. I did, however, hear an interesting story about how the New Zealand team got the nickname "the All-Blacks". That's easy, you may answer, it's because they always wear black. Not so.

Yes, they are the only team to wear black and so never have to wear away colours, but that's not where the name comes from. Apparently, when they first visited England in the nineteen thirties, everybody thought that this bunch of sheep farmers were going to get slaughtered by the UK teams. To everyone's surprise, they inflicted a humiliating defeat on the English(serves 'em right!).

A journalist for one of the major British newspapers wrote about the match with the headline, "All Backs", meaning that the whole team were "backs", the position that requires all the skills needed in Rugby. Of course, when the article went to be typeset, the person responsible concluded that it must have been an error and inserted an "l" to make it "All-Blacks". And thus the legend was born.

I have no idea if this story is true or not, but a little research on the net should yield either a confirmation or a denial, but whatever the case, it's interesting to see how new words and phrases can develop unintentionally, sometimes just because of a simple typing mistake.

What's your learner style?

2006-11-16T16:09:00.000+01:00

Everybody has their own style when it comes to learning. At the most basic level, there are three categories: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Here is a quick summary:

visual
Images are really important to the visual learner. These learners have trouble paying attention to someone talking - they would rather see a picture or a diagram. If this is you, invest in some coloured pens for note taking and devise a system that works for you. Perhaps negatives in red, questions in blue etc. Mind maps are the ideal way for you to record information. Have a look at my mind map pages to see some examples.

auditory
Of course, your ears are the most important asset in language learning, and so everyone needs to cultivate their auditory learning capacities. If you prefer listening to reading, love music and are generally sensitive to the sounds around you, then you are an auditory learner. Get as much listening material as you can, radio, films, CD's etc. The internet is a good source of listening - just look for Radio stations in the language you are learning.

Kinesthetic

Are you a "touchy-feely" person? Do you like to touch people when you are talking to them? Do you fiddle with objects while talking or thinking, eg, pens, paper, twisting paper clips etc? Then you are probably a kinesthetic learner. Your world is more tactile than others, you like doing things more than talking about them. You would be advised to have some flashcards that you can handle while revising vocabulary, and playing board games in your target language would be useful.

Using the internet

2006-11-15T15:51:00.000+01:00

I'm a fan of Google, as I've said before. Their search engine almost always pulls up the results I'm looking for. The internet is a fantastic resource for language learning, as you can find free courses, dictionaries, chat-rooms to help you.

When learning vocabulary and expressions, though, a single dictionary definition can be a bit limited. Here's what I do when I want to fully understand a word or phrase that I've come across, but am little uncertain as to its use:

Simple type the word or phrase into google in speech marks (guillemets ""). Google will pull up not only dictionary definitions but examples of the word or phrase in various contexts - something that is essential in language acqisition. Have a look a five or more of these references and you will have a good idea of how a native speaker uses it.

Try it out: do a search for "brown nosing"; "takes the biscuit" "parrot-fashion" and see what results you get!

English people learning French

2006-11-14T09:33:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I got hold of the BBC series "excuse my French" on DVD. It's a kind of reality TV programme about three "celebrities" (a shamed ex-football manager sacked from his TV job for racist comments, a has-been TV presenter and a young comedian struggling to be actually funny) who have come to France in order to learn French.

It's quite entertaining to watch these people humiliate themselves for the television, while not making any real progress in French. Their attitude is typically English: this is hard, I don't want to do it, why can't everybody just speak English, my teachers are going about it the wrong way, etc.

The football manager was starting as a complete beginner and found it really hard to get to grips with his pronunciation and remembering new vocabulary. In the programme, however, his teacher was quite hard on him for not putting together complete sentences. She keeps telling him to use verbs! On this point, I'm afraid I have to take sides with Big Ron, the football manager. In one scene he attends a local football match to help the team with their tactics. Using the limited vocabulary he has, he succeeds in getting his ideas across, the team adopts his tactics and score a goal.

Big Ron has achieved the ultimate goal in language learning - communicating ideas. He didn't use any verbs, and he didn't make a coherent sentence, but he succeeded nevertheless. As 90% of communication is non-verbal - facial expressions, gestures, body language, intonation - producing a well-formed sentence is of little importance, while a good vocabulary is essential.

The English Only Rule in the Classroom

2006-11-13T14:05:00.000+01:00

A new teacher started at the company I work for (for whom I work, if you prefer), and she asked me about the English-only rule that is insisted on here. Her concern was that as she had a class of very low elementary students, how would it be possible to do everything in English?

This is something that has caused me a lot of concern, too. English-only is the ideal, to be sure, but is it really possible? More importantly, is it really beneficial for the students? If your intention is to use a communicative approach in your lessons, how long will you be able to keep up the English-only rule when you have a group of beginners or low elementaries in front of you? I'm afraid that in a lot of classes the English-only rule is only maintained by avoiding real communication and replacing it with grammar exercises or other activities that involve giving the students handouts and telling them to read the instructions. It's a very brave teacher indeed who can go empty-handed into an elementary lesson and try to facilitate learning in a natural, communicative way.

Personally, I believe that translations are necessary and useful for adult learners. while child-like learning has many advantages, there is no risk of first language(L1) interference, it's drawbacks are also numerous:
It's very slow: a lot of time can be spent defining a new word, when a one-word translation would have been sufficient
It could insult your learner's intelligence: I have often drawn pictures, gesticulated wildy, played all kinds of games in order to avoid translating, only to be asked, "so what is it in French?" If the students know you can speak their language, it's hard to pretend that you don't.

If you have a class for an hour and half once a week, it's unrealistic to expect to do everything in English, students need quick, clear explanations before moving on. On the contrary, if you are teaching in an English-speaking country, not only will you have international classes where translation is impossible, but also your learners have the opportunity to put into practice every day new language they acquire, thus accelerating the assimilation process. In no way is it necessary to use L1 in those circumstances.

Onestop English.com

2006-11-12T17:31:00.000+01:00

I used to visit the website onestopenglish.com to get free materials for my lessons, except recently it has become subscription only at a cost of 24GBP (about 34€). OK, so people like me were downloading the free worksheets without ever for one moment considering actually buying anything from Macmillan publications, but surely that's what the net is for isn't it? If I have to spend that kind of money on materials, I would rather go and buy a nice book from my local English bookshop. Publishing houses like Macmillan have probably lost a lot of money in missed sales by giving away half the content of their books -too bad for them - nobody refuses freebies like that.

If you are a teacher or a learner of English I strongly advise you NOT to pay for anything on the net. The net is all about sharing information - freely. Some of the worksheets on onestop were quite good, but some of them absolutely appalling. Why on Earth would I want to pay for a worksheet that asks students to write in the spaces the past simple of half a dozen irregular verbs. Is that teaching? Why not tell your students to invest in a half-decent dictionary or grammar book, so that you can concentrate on helping them to learn something. I did actually spend money on a site called handoutsonline.com and was hugely disappointed with the shabby worksheets produced by lovers of Microsoft clip art.

The best feature on onestop English was probably the Guardian Weekly reading lessons. Here again, the net is chock-full of articles that you can use in class. It doesn't take a genius to prepare a reading article like the ones found on onestopenglish.com. You simply choose a few words from your chosen text that you think your students might not be familiar with, write a definition for each one and instruct your learners to match them up. Then ask a few comprehension questions and finish off with a discussion about the rights and wrongs of this particular subjet.

The communication technology available nowadays means that virtually all artificial language teaching resources are obsolete. We now have the marvelous opportunity to use materials that come from the real world and might actually be of interest to our students, unlike the total crap found in bestsellers like "Headway".

More thoughts on teaching the present progressive

2006-11-12T13:05:00.000+01:00

When teaching the present progressive, or continuous, tense, we often concentrate on structure: you have a subject, followed by the auxiliary, “be” followed by the “-ing” form of the verb. A lot of teachers have started calling this verb “the –ing verb”, and rightly so, as I am convinced that virtually nobody can say for sure what the correct term for it is.

Would you call it the gerund? No, because the gerund is the noun derived from a verb, not a verb itself. Here we have a completely different discussion, and another lesson to prepare. You probably do a free time/interests lesson where you ask the question “what do you like doing?”. Your students have the opportunity to practise real gerunds, as in sentences like, “I like playing football, going skiing, painting, reading, shopping...”

You, of course, as a serious ESL professional, know that in a sentence like “I am having a shower”, the “-ing” verb is actually the present participle. How sure are you about that?

participles or adjectives?
If I say, “I am tired”, I know that “am” is the verb and that “tired” is obviously an adjective, given that “to be” is a verb of state, and an adjective is used to add detail to a noun, in this case a pronoun, “I”. But tired is also the past participle of the verb “to tire”. Just as past participles can be used as adjectives, so can present participles: The match was tiring, this film is boring” etc. Expressions like “running water” or “travelling salesman” contain “-ing” adjectives.
When saying “I am” we are invariably talking about a present state, so what’s the difference between “I am tired”, and “I am working”? To say “I am working” also indicates my present state, even if technically speaking “working” is the present participle, not an adjective. Interestingly, in French there is no present progressive tense, they use an adjectival phrase which translates, “I am in the process of to work”. A fine line indeed between adjectives and participles!

All these thoughts have led me to believe that they should not discussed with your students, being indeed pointless grammatical debate that will not help them one little bit to communicate more effectively. Instead of trying to have your students build sentences from pre-defined parts, i.e. aux + verb+ing = present progressive = something happening now why not make a mind map of all the possible things we could say starting with “I am”. After all, “I am English” is a present, just like “I am working”. You could brainstorm emotions, physical condition, nationalities, age, jobs, and what is happening now. This way, rather than focussing on meaningless grammatical structure, you are giving your students functional language that they can use outside the classroom.

teaching using cartoon storyboards

2006-11-08T12:00:00.000+01:00

A great way to get students talking to each other is to give them a cartoon storyboard and have them tell the story. Put students in pairs to discuss what they think is happening, one of them writes it down, and finally we compare stories to see which one is closest to real story. It doesn't matter if you can't draw, bad drawings encourage more use of the imagination!

My favourite story is "the choking doberman". It is a very popular urban legend that you can find all over the net. I draw the scenes of the girl finding her dog choking up till the burglar being arrested, with his hand bleeding. It's fun seeing whether the students can guess what happened to the burglar.

You can tell your students to use only present tenses, which are good for storytelling, or in the past as a grammar review. You will find at the end that they will probably need to use difficult grammar like the past perfect, "in the end, the vet realised that the dog had bitten two of the burglar's fingers off"

Look for other urban legends on the net for story ideas.

teaching present tenses

2006-11-08T11:16:00.000+01:00

When teaching low level students, we generally try to progressively introduce grammar points as and when we feel that previous points have been mastered. So a typical programme for beginners is to start with the present simple tense, I am, I go, I do, then add adverbs of frequency, I always go shopping on Saturday, I am sometimes late, I never do my homework. Next comes the tricky part: explaining to your students that there are two present tenses, the second one being the progressive tense, for actions happening now, or for fairly certain future events. How do you introduce it?

Perhaps you begin with a miming game: “can you guess what I am doing?” After miming the action, you elicit the form, “I am drinking a cup of tea”. This type of activity is generally a very good way to present this new tense.

My problem, however, is the “modelling” part of the lesson. As we were taught in our ESL training, a good lesson should be structured according using the formula “elicit, model and drill”. I can’t help feeling that as I was never taught that the present progressive is formed using the auxiliary, be, with verb plus –ing ending when I was a child, then there’s really no point in teaching it to adult learners of English.

Once you have started trying to explain structure, you will find yourself getting deeper and deeper into meaningless discussions about grammar. Most of your learners will already have some knowledge of English grammar, not all of it correct, from their school years. As their teachers were probably non-native English speakers, the information given was probably at best incomplete, if not totally misleading. Perhaps the word “gerund” may enter the discussion. As an English teaching professional, do you really know what a gerund is? What is the best way of explaining it to your students? If your lesson is on the present progressive tense, then you have let yourself get way off track, for the –ing verb is not a gerund, it’s the present participle.

As I’ve already said, when I was three years old and getting to grips with my mother tongue, English, I had no idea what a gerund or a present participle was. I just used them. So teachers, give your students a healthy amount of active communication, and keep the grammar as a necessary, but not overwhelming, sideline to your lessons.

Get your intonation right

2006-10-18T11:58:00.000+02:00

So you've just finished your 100 hours of English class and you've studied all the English tenses, irregular verbs, comparatives, prepositions and modal verbs. So you can speak English, right? Wrong. You arrive in London for that long-awaited shopping/theatre trip and suddenly you realise that you can't understand a word of what people there are saying!

What went wrong? You had a good teacher. You studied hard and took careful notes of vocabulary items and grammar rules. But the English they speak in England still seems like chinese.

It could be Chinese for all you know because it's not the same English that your teacher spoke. It is normal, even very necessary, for your teacher to speak slowly and clearly so that you understand. I increase the pace of my speech as my students level of understanding improves. But even with high level students my speech isn't the same as the way I speak in England, with my family for example.

More important than pronunciation is intonation. English words have strong stress patterns, unlike French, which can sound a little monotone in comparison. There is a stressed syllable (accent tonique) and a weak syllable in almost every word.

So a word like "manager" is pronounced "MANager" Ooo

but "computer" is pronounced "comPUTer" or oOo.

In your dictionary, the stressed syllable is indicated by an apostrophe ' before the stressed syllable. You don't have to learn phonetics, but it helps to recognise a few of the vowel sounds.
You can find them here: pronunciation guide

You must listen to a lot of spoken English in order to have a good level of comprehension. One good way is to listen to "The Archers" every day. You can find my advice about this (in French) here or in English on this blog.

Telephone Tips

2006-10-11T15:04:00.000+02:00

Even if you are have a good level in English, talking on the telephone can be a difficult task. Why? Because only a small amount of communication is verbal, that is, the actual words we use. The rest, as much as 90%, is non-verbal - our facial expressions, gestures, the intonation in our voice, body language, etc.

Here is my advice if you are feeling nervous about speaking on the phone:

Relax. The more stressed you are, the more difficult it will be to understand. Most people are sympathetic when they realise that English is not your mother tongue, so don't be afraid to tell them so, and ask them to repeat if necessary.
Summarise what you have been told. By repeating back in your own words what the caller has said, you can confirm whether you have understand correctly. The caller will appreciate this as a sign that you are interested in what he is saying. If you have to write down a telephone number, email or postal address, read it back to the person for confirmation.
Use the international phonetic alphabet when spelling. This is used in avaition to avoid potentially catastophic misunderstandings! You can find it at this site: http://www.answers.com/topic/nato-phonetic-alphabet
Concentrate. Don't be distracted by your colleagues, and especially don't be reading your emails at the same time. You need to focus, so cut out unnecessary distractions

Using mind maps for concept questions

2006-06-30T12:49:00.000+02:00

If you are a language teacher, you probably already use mind maps to help your students learn vocabulary. These mind maps are sometimes referred to as “vocabulary networks” or “word maps”. One popular use of such mind maps is organising vocabulary groups, e.g. your central theme is “food” and your sub-themes are “meat”, “fruit”, “vegetables” etc. Another way might be to associate the various nouns, adjectives and verbs with your central theme, e.g. television, programme, film, switch on, watch, interesting, boring...
But have you considered using mind maps for teaching grammar points? Anyone with a TEFL qualification will be familiar with using concept questions to help students understand a tricky element of grammar in English. For example, when giving advice, an English speaker invariably uses the modal verbs should or ought to. There are likely no equivalent verbs in your students’ language, so you would ask concept questions to check that they have understood:

you should see a doctor
Is it an obligation to see a doctor? – no
Is it a good idea to see a doctor? – yes

By answering these two questions, the learner has a good notion of when to use should. But putting these questions into a mind map will help your learner to both visualise the concepts and retain them for future use. In my classes, I write up two questions side by side and circle them. The questions are, “Is it necessary?” and “Is it allowed?” I then start to make my mind map by writing the only two possible answers, yes or no? I then try to elicit the modal verbs, must, mustn’t, have to, don’t have to, can, can’t, according to the answer, and write them in the appropriate place on the mind map.

Perhaps my explanations here aren’t really clear. That’s exactly why mind-mapping is a better way to help your students visualise the concepts. You can try to explain until you’re blue in the face, but a simple diagram does the trick quickly and effectively. You can see an example of a mind map that I created on my site – really, a picture does paint a thousand words!

Think about what points of grammar you are having trouble teaching and start developing concept questions that you can put into a mind map. For my French students, the present perfect causes no end of confusion, because they use the same construction to talk about completed past actions – yesterday, I have been to the cinema. What concept questions do you think could help them see the difference between “I went” and “I’ve been”? It’s up to you to use your imagination!

The Big Mistake that Stops you Learning

2006-04-03T09:39:00.000+02:00

Want to know what’s holding you back from learning a foreign language? It’s the one thing that children NEVER do when learning their mother tongue. You were a child once, and you learned to speak your first language without ever making this mistake. But adults just can’t stop themselves from doing it! What is it? It’s the question “WHY?”

“Why do you say that in French? It just doesn’t make sense”, I would repeatedly ask my wife. This has an incredibly de-motivating effect on the brain’s desire to assimilate new information. Subconsciously, I am saying to myself, “this is really dumb, I don’t want to do this.” I noticed this when trying to conduct conversation classes. A student will invariably ask, “how long you live here?” When I correct the mistake, “how long have you lived here?” they say, “why?” It’s not like that in their language, so they don’t want to believe that it’s like that in English. They even continue to come up with variations that they think sound better and ask me if they can use them. “No”, I say. “Why not?”, they respond. The whole lesson is wasted because they refuse to believe what I, the English teacher, am telling them!

My advice: even if you don’t understand why something is said a particular way, just accept it and move on.

Do you speak Viking?

2006-03-31T15:31:00.000+02:00

I talk a lot in class about how English is not so difficult to learn - it's just a dialect of French with all the same words of Latin origin. So when you visit my site you see lists of words that are exactly the same in both languages. It's a great way to begin - knowing that you already have a big vocabulary gives you the confidence you need to start speaking. The words that are more difficult to learn are of course those of Germanic origin. When there is no linguistic link, it is harder to remember.
During a lesson today I was explaining all this and happened to mention that there are a lot of Viking words in English. My student asked me for some examples, and of course I couldn't think of any right there. Here is a site with all the Viking words:

www.viking.no

What you must remember when you are studying English vocabulary is that common everyday words are Viking or Anglo-Saxon - sky, home, husband, egg, and that intellectual or cultural words are Latin or Greek - ameliorate, philosophy, annual, precedent...

Do you know this word? Really know it?

2006-03-26T22:16:00.000+02:00

I read recently that a good way to improve your memory is to pay more attention to details. Apparently, we go through life not really noticing things and that's why we can never remember what someone was wearing, or where we put our keys, or even what we were talking about 3 minutes ago.
The same could be said for learning words. When we encounter a new word, we briefly think about it then move on to the next thing we want to say. After a couple of minutes, we have already forgotten the word. If you are taking notes during a class, here is good way to review your notes so you can better retain a word. OK, you can look at each new word one after the other in the desperate hope of remembering them in the future, but I think it would be better to look at just a few words in much greater detail.

Let's take the word "book". A simple word that you all know. Did you know that the word comes from the German word for "beech", which is a tree from which tablets were made to write on? What other ways can we use the word book? It's also a verb, "to book", meaning "to reserve" - a hotel, a train ticket etc. When we say "the plane was overbooked", it means that the airline sold more seats than there actually are on the plane to be sure that the plane is full when it leaves. In French, we now say "surbooké", and now you know why.

"Book" as a noun also means "a ledger", or a book where financial records are kept. This has given us the expression, "to cook the books" which means that the financial records have been changed dishonestly to make things look better than they really are.

What about someone who reads a lot? We call them "bookworms". The man who takes your money at the horseraces if you want to bet on a horse? He's a bookmaker. Someone who keeps the financial records? She's a book-keeper.

Now you have begun to really know the word. Do this with just one word every day and you will understand a lot more of what you read or hear in English.

I've discovered a marvellous interactive dictionary that will help you to improve your vocabulary. It's called the Visual Thesaurus and I highly recommend that you try it out today!

To do or not to do, that is the question

2006-03-17T12:00:00.000+01:00

When teaching beginners, it is always a difficult task to persuade them that they need to use the auxiliary verb 'do' when asking questions or making negative statements. For my French-speaking students there isn't any logic in this, as there is no equivalent in French. I also explain that we NEVER use 'do' with the verb 'be'. A classic error: *"do you are hungry?" or even no verb at all, just the auxiliary: *"do you married?"
These are normal mistakes, and I'm not laughing at them - I know that asking questions is no easy thing when you are just beginning.

I'm going to make things even worse by telling you when you CAN use 'do' with 'be'.
In the imperative, especially negative: "Don't be stupid" "Don't be late" etc. We sometimes use it in positive sentences to add emphasis: "Do be quiet".

So in fact I'm not right to say never for do and be, but I don't want to confuse beginners any more than they already are. But if you have a good level, it's worth knowing.

English words I didn't know existed

2006-03-14T12:59:00.000+01:00

Sometimes I find myself in the embarrassing situation of not knowing an English word a student uses in class. It happened today with the word "dint". The student was summarizing an article he had just read, so I had no reason to believe that it was a product of his imgination or a mis-pronunciation. And there it was in the dictionary. Oops. Well I can't be expected to know every word in the English language, can I? According to Websters online, the Rosetta edition, this word gets used 73 times in a sample of 100 million words, and is thus ranked 73000. As I have a vocabulary of around 12000 words (I've never tried to count them, but that's the average for most people), it's easy to see why I don't know this word.
Compare these statistics for the word I would have used instead of dint: "means". "By means of" is used to express how a result is achieved, the same as "by dint of". Except I've never heard anyone say "by dint of". "Means is ranked 963 as a noun, which is well within my vocabulary limitations!
Try the Webster's website to see for yourself how often a word is used before adding it to your active vocabulary.

What they don't teach you in class - part 3

2006-03-13T16:17:00.000+01:00

It's easy to correct grammar. But sometimes in correcting grammar, teachers forget that the student is using vocabulary that is not natural in English. Here is a good example: the verb "to invite". I can say, "I'm not going because I wasn't invited" or "have you been invited?". But if I ask the question, "what are you doing tomorrow?" you might be tempted to answer, "I am invited to my sister's." This doesn't sound right to me. Wouldn't it be more natural to say, "I'm going to my sister's"? The being invited part is understood. My future plans don't include being invited, that already happened. To say, "I've been invited to my sister's" is better than "I am invited" - at least grammatically - but it doesn't answer the question "what are doing tomorrow". Just because you have been invited, that doesn't necessarily mean that you are going - you might decline the invitation.
This kind of communication difficulty is not limited to non-native speakers. We all have a responsibility to express ourselves in a way that can be clearly understood - whatever the language we are speaking.

Stop saying "How do you do" !

2006-03-11T11:40:00.000+01:00

I don't know how many of you were taught to say "how do you do" at school, but I'd just like to tell you that virtually nobody says it anymore. If you want to enquire about someone's health, the question is "how are you?" or possibly "how are you doing?" which is more common in American English. Did you notice that I didn't put an exclamation mark after "how do you do" ? That's because it isn't a question. Your teachers mistakenly thought that it is the same as "how are you?", only a little more polite. The reality is, that in "posher" society, the phrase "how do do you do" is used when one is introduced, and the response is, funnily enough, "how do you do".
Strange, eh? Well I don't know anyone who says it these days, if you are being introduced to someone you've never met before, you should say "nice to meet you". Here is another example of misleading teaching from non-native teachers of English. I hear tons of examples of old-fashioned expressions from students who learned English from teachers who learned English thirty or forty years ago. Stay in touch with modern English by reading and listening to the radio.

Use your ears, not your eyes

2006-03-10T11:48:00.000+01:00

Here is a conversation I heard in class the other day. I asked a student to use the vocabulary she had learned the previous week to tell another student about her hobby.
She said, "I like sewing". The other student responded, "sewing? How do you spell it?"
- "S-E-W - to sew"
- "OK, to sew, like 'you'"
- "No, like 'go'"
- "Sorry? didn't you say S-E-W?"
- "Yes, I did"
- "But that's "u" like "few"

It took a few minutes to convince her that in fact the correct pronunciation for "sew" ryhmes with "go". She didn't have any problem with the word when she first heard it, but as soon as she saw the way it was spelt, she couldn't pronounce it any more. We just can't help ourselves (I do it too with French words). Have a little trust in you teacher, he or she usually pronounces words correctly! I suggest that you learn the phonetic symbols for at least the vowel sounds. It doesn't take long, and it's a really inexpensive way to master English pronunciation. All you need is a dictionary that uses the international alphabet, and you will know how to pronounce any word in English. Get into the habit of taking notes in phonetic symbols, so you don't confused by all the spelling variations in English.
You can see the phonetic alphabet on my site. There is also a link to a university phonetics lab, which is really good practice. If you're serious about learning English, you have to do it!

English too difficult? Try Globish

2006-03-07T22:39:00.000+01:00

It's the latest thing in international communication. Remember Esperanto? It was supposed to become the world's language so we could all understand each other and be one big happy global family. It didn't work. Nobody wanted to learn an artificial language when there are already thousands of perfectly good languages spoken by real people. Today, most people in the world use English to communicate internationally. But English, just like most languages, is full of idioms, is impossible to know how to pronounce a word from its spelling and has all those fiddly modal verbs that are so difficult master. So one day someone invented the word globish. Just like "brunch" (breakfast + lunch) Globish is derived from "global" and "English".

Globish is refreshingly free of idioms. You just use the words that everybody understands, of which there are only about 1500. You can get the list of these 1500 words at this site:http://perso.wanadoo.fr/yvanbaptiste/audioglob/index.htm

And the good news for you French speakers is that half of the words you know from French. Here I go again about Latin words in English...
In the first 21 words beginning with "a" I found able, accept, account, accident, act, accuse, activist, actor, add, administration, admit, adult, advertisement(un faux ami mais quand même utile),affect, afraid(effrayé)
; no less than 15 or 66% have the same roots as the equivalent French word.

So globish is the way forward in international communication. If everyone in the world had at least these 1500 words in English, then Globish itself could start to evolve into a real, sophisticated language with all the nuances and subtleties of English, French etc...

A great way to learn English!

2006-03-06T22:27:00.000+01:00

After a lot of reflection about the best way to learn English, and after having read the ideas of ESL professionals like Scrivener and Kauffman, I have finally found the perfect solution to all your language learning needs. Most ESL teachers agree that the only way to make to progress is exposure to English as often as possible, real English in real contexts, not artificial classroom English based on grammar practice.

The Archers is the solution! What is it? It's a BBC soap opera that runs every day on radio four. A soap opera by the way is a series based on people's lives, with usually several stories running simultaneously. The Archers is broadcast on the internet so anyone with a good connection can listen everyday, from anywhere in the world.

Listen to the Archers every day, and read the related articles. You will begin to learn real English in real situations. You won't ever need to buy another textbook.

Start listening to the Archers right now by clicking on this link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/

Here's some advice:

Read the synopsis of the episode first.
Listen to the programme.
Don't be discouraged if you find it hard to understand, that's normal.
Try to listen for the key words used in the synopsis.
Listen again and take a note of words or expressions you didn't understand.
Use a dictionary to check new words.

good luck and happy listening!

How Google can help you learn English

2006-03-06T16:41:00.000+01:00

I love Google. They made a great search engine that almost everyone uses, and have invented lots of great stuff for internet users. I also get my site hosting and internet connection paid for by advertising revenue I receive from Google ads. If you are learning English, Google is a great help. You should definitely download the google toolbar so you can use the translation feature. You simply choose a language you want the English word to be translated into, then when you are surfing, just roll the mouse over the word and you get your translation. So now you can surf the net in English with help from Google. Go to google.com to download the toolbar.

What makes a good teacher?

2006-03-02T12:24:00.000+01:00

Do you remember the teachers you had when you were in school? Perhaps you only remember one or two. Why have these ones stuck in your memory, while the others have slipped away? I'll tell you about one teacher who made a big impact on me when I was about eleven. His name was Mr.Wilkes. I loved him because he had endless enthusiasm about the subjects he taught. His lessons were never boring. What made him such a good teacher? For me he was more than a teacher. He was someone who had done other things than working in a school all his life. He had travelled, seen the world, met interesting people. So he had stories to tell. I used to listen to him with awe every time he talked about his experiences. I especially loved doing history and geography, because he was able to make them come alive with his own personal stories.
I hope you will find a language teacher like him, it could radically improve your chances of success.

Learn some idioms

2006-02-27T09:28:00.000+01:00

If you read my article on globish, you will know that you can communicate quite effectively with people of any nationality with a limited amount of vocabulary. But what if you want to take your English a little further, to be able to speak like the natives? Then your language needs to become more idiomatic. In some languages the word "idiom" just means "language", but here I'm talking about those expressions that mean something different to the literal meaning of the individual words. Everyone knows the idiom "it's raining cats and dogs". There are no literal cats or dogs, so what we understand is different to the actual words, and we gather that it simply means, "its raining very hard". If English is not your first language, or you are studying another language, these expressions are not easy to learn. In French, if you say, "it's fingers in the nose", you are talking about something very easy to do. How could you know that if you weren't told? To an unsuspecting student, this would sound like a disgusting habit!

I've put some useful English idioms on my site. I'm going to improve the explanations by adding example sentences, so keep checking back. There is a different one every day for a month, so that's thirty to start with. Go here:
English idioms

The one hundred most common words and why you don't need to learn them

2006-02-24T22:50:00.000+01:00

It is said that there are only one hundred words that make up 50% of all language. Great! All you have to do is learn these one hundred words and you will be half-way there in your ambition to learn a new language. Here are the top twelve words in the list: a, and, he, I, in, is, it, of, that, the, to, was. Now try making a sentence with these words. You can't? Nothing at all? What went wrong? These twelve words make up a quarter of all reading, so you should be able to say something with them, shouldn't you?
The problem with this brilliant idea is that the most common words are only words that don't carry any meaning in themselves, like articles, conjunctions and prepositions etc. And it gets worse - imagine that you decided to learn all these words in French in order to get a head start. The indefinite article, "a" in French could be "un" or "une". "At" could be "à", "au", "aux", but then the word "to" could be one of those words as well. How are you going to know? I can't imagine how difficult it would be in a language like Chinese.
By the way, if these words make up 50% of all language, what about the other 50%? Just another 100 would be easy. But the second 50% is actually tens of thousands of words, which are crucial if you want to say something useful! The one hundred word theory is extremely important when teaching children to read, but not at all helpful to language students. Don't forget that the best way to assimilate these words is to learn correct example sentences. You can read about how to do this using flashcards at bonnes astuces (in French) or learning vocabulary (in English)

Beware of non-English English websites

2006-02-20T18:14:00.000+01:00

I mentioned in one of my last articles that there is a website called anglaisfacile.com which has no connection to my site anglais-facile.com. It's a good site if you want to do exercises. But let me ask you something. If you wanted to learn to swim, would you go to a ski instructor? Probably not. So if you want to learn English, why go to a French site? I say this because I spotted a glaring error in one of the grammar lessons presented on anglaisfacile.com. It is a lesson on the "auxiliary verb, to be". Yes "be" is an auxiliary verb, sometimes. But the lesson uses example sentences like "I am happy", in which "to be" is not an auxiliary, but a real verb. In the sentence "John is picking his nose", the verb is "to pick", while "is" is the auxiliary. So beware. Don't believe everything you read on the net, especially if it's written by someone whose native language is not English. Let's face it, I don't know that much about English grammar, and I'm British! Why not stop studying grammar and do something worthwhile instead, like actually speaking English with someone?

What's the best way to learn phrasal verbs?

2006-02-15T11:21:00.000+01:00

A phrasal verb is a combination of a verb and a prepostion that makes a different verb to the original one-word version. For example, "get" means "obtenir" in French, "get up" means "se lever" and "get out" means "sortir".
Students often complain that they are difficult to learn because they can never be sure which preposition should be used. Here's my advice: don't learn phrasal verbs, learn vocabulary. You want to say "je me suis levé" in English, it's "I got up". Voilà. The worst thing you can do is try to study phrasal verbs separately from other words. There's no point. Just learn what you need to say. How can you benefit from studying all the variations of "get"? It takes every preposition - up, down, in, out, over, about, through, across, by, on, off; and you will never be able to assimilate all of them if you study them systematically. Even worse- and I've seen this in serious grammar books- is to study them by preposition - get up, break up, wake up, puke up, mess up, etc. Then there are teachers who tell their students to write a story using all the phrasal verbs they have studied in the lesson. "I woke up at 8 and got up. I went to the pub for a booze-up and after I messed up my room because I had puked up. Then I broke up with my girlfriend. When she called, I hung up the phone." I think you can see what a fruitless and un-natural exercise this is.
Want to improve your English? Keep talking! With real people in real situations! And keep reading my blog!

Gap-fill exercises - a complete waste of time

2006-02-14T20:13:00.001+01:00

You will find on my site a few gap-fill exercises that I made using borrowed scripts from elsewhere on the net. I have to be honest and say that the only reason I put them up was to entice people to my site. People who had typed "exercices anglais" or something like that into Google. Exercises you want, so exercises you'll get. What do I think about the pedagogical value of such exercises? Not much. The only reason I can think of why they might be useful is perhaps for people who need to take an exam that involves gap-fills, drag and drop, definition matching and the like.
You would get more benefit from reading the ingredients on your cereal box in English at breakfast time. I have used this technique to learn the words for "wheat", "corn", "sugar" etc in Portugese, Greek and Spanish.
I had the misfortune last year to get the job of writing these useless exercises for the ministry of education. And I am ashamed of the results. I admit that I now put "creation of on-line learning materials" on my CV, but at the same time I am happy that the site is password protected, so a potential employer can't see what a pile of crap they are.
The worst are exercises that make you find the correct definition of a given word. These exercises usually take words that no foreign learner of English is likely to know, and probably will never have need for anyway. Why not just look them up in a dictionary? When you think you have a pretty good of idea of the meaning, write ten different sentences using the new word and ask an English-speaking friend if they sound correct.

What they don't teach you in class part 2

2006-01-25T21:20:00.000+01:00

Last time I wrote about difficulties understanding spoken English, this time I'm going to tell you about vocabulary items that we almost always forget to teach you in class but are nevertheless essential if you spend any time in an English speaking country.

If you heard someone say, "fancy going for a drink?", what would you reply? The correct answer would be "OK,let's go" or "no thanks, another time perhaps". So now we know that "fancy" means avoir envie and that we should say "do you fancy", but often it's too much effort so we just say "fancy".

That's one vocabulary item. But what about "for a drink"? This might seem strange for a student of English who has learned that "drink" is a verb. But it's also a noun, "une boisson" or in this context, "un verre". No amount of grammar knowledge could help you to produce a sentence like "fancy going for a drink?". You just have to learn them by heart. Try using my cards method to help you assimilate this kind of language. By the way I would translate this question as "Ca te dirais d'aller boire un verre?" (correct me if there are any mistakes!).

You see, when we learn grammar, we learn fixed formulas that are largely ignored by native speakers. A language that had no idioms would be kind of easy to learn. Alas, there aren't any languages like that.

So you learn that the past tense of "ride" is "rode". Great. Now what? Someone asks you what you did last weekend and you proudly answer, "I ride my bike". I'm sorry, but that wasn't the answer I was looking for. It doesn't tell the information I wanted. You told me that you rode you bike. You rode you bike for one minute, you rode your bike to the baker's to buy some bread...what? The correct grammar tells me nothing. So just like "go for a drink", if you want to tell me that you actually spent some time on your bike for pleasure you would say, "I went for a ride on my bike. I tell my students to use this all the time, because no-one has ever told them before.

Here are a few more examples in case anyone should ask you about your weekend, holiday, trip etc:

I went for a swim in the sea
we went for a meal in a posh restaurant (it's stupid to say "we ate in restaurant", what else do you do there?)
I went for a drive in my car
We went for a pizza
We went for a walk in the town centre

Use the gerund for other things:

We went skiing, shopping, horse-riding, rollerskating (don't say "roller") carting, bungee-jumping, hiking, etc.

Some memory techniques

2006-01-13T10:55:00.000+01:00

I promised to tell you about how I learned something in Chinese that I'll never forget. It may give you a good idea about how to remember difficult words in English, it's not about learning Chinese! My wife's nephew is actually learning Chinese and when we were visiting in the Summer he showed me his Chinese learning CD-ROM. One exercise involved listening to a sentence and repeating it into a microphone. The computer would tell you if your pronunciation was correct. Now I don't believe for one second that a computer can judge a person's accent - when I try the exercise with the English programs we have at work, I never manage to persuade the computer that my accent is correct. And I'm English, for goodness' sake! Computers obviously aren't trained to recognise my Birmingham accent.

But this exercise proved to be useful for another, unrelated reason. By trying to get the correct pronunciation, I must have repeated the sentence at least thirty times. And after a short while, I realised that it sounded a little like an English word, a vulgar one at that, "bullshitter", which is slang for a person who tells lots of lies or exagerations (mythomane).

So now I have two good ways of remembering the sentences, one, repetition and two, a mnemonic link. This will work for you in English. If you repeat something often enough, you will remember it. And if you can relate it to something you already know, even better. There's a joke website that states that "ail ou radis?" sounds like "are you ready?" in English. Although this site is just for fun, the principles are really effective.
This is the the link:

So learning can be fun, even if repetition is the best way to remember new words.

Do you think in English?

2006-01-06T09:11:00.000+01:00

I am always being asked what language I think in. A popular belief is that in order to speak a language well you must think in that language. But the question I'd like the answer to is, "do you need language in order to think?". Consider for a moment: do animals think? What about small babies, do they think? What do they think?

Babies and animals do think, and yet they don't have language. It's true that while we are thinking we "hear" the words in our heads, so our thinking abilities are far more developed than those of animals.

I'm sorry, but I don't think in French. When I'm alone, the only words I hear in my head are English ones. That doesn't mean I can't speak French. Forget this notion that you have to think in your target language - it's really a worthless objective. When you can speak a language fluently, like your mother tongue for example, do you consciously think in advance about every word that you are going to say? Of course not. You simply don't think. It's the same for me.

In your mother tongue you are used to saying the same things every day, hello, how are you, it's a nice day, where have you been, I liked it, I hated it, etc. You have been repeating these words and expressions every day since you began to speak. So you don't need to think about them. This is the right way to proceed in a foreign language.

Next time, I'll tell how I learned one thing in Chinese that I will never be able to forget!

My teacher doesn't speak my language - good or bad?

2006-01-05T10:53:00.000+01:00

Many students of English have teachers who do not do speak the native language of the country in which they work. The English teaching business is largely populated by young graduates who want to see the world before settling down to their chosen career at home. Teaching English is the best way to finance these stays in exotic countries. But if a young person only intends to stay one year in Japan for example, he has little or no motivation to learn Japanese. In addition, the latest trend in language teaching is "immersion", that is, we only use the target language (in our case English).

So what are the advantages or disadvantages of having a teacher who only speaks English? The benefits to you, the student, are numerous. You have no choice but to communicate in English. You therefore maximise your opportunities to speak and actually learn something. This is very good practice for the real world where you may have to make yourself understood with no help from a dictionary or someone to translate.

My big problem with this however, is how competent is your teacher? We have a negative proverb about people who become teachers: those who can, do. those who can't, teach. This is saying those with the ability to do a certain job will do that job, while those who have little or no ability will try to teach others. I don't agree with this of course, being a teacher myself(!), but there is an element of truth to it when it comes to language teachers. Someone who teaches maths should be good at maths, shouldn't he? If someone got fired for being incompetent, would he make a good teacher of his trade? So how can someone teach a foreign language if they are not able to learn one? The least they can do is make an effort.

Sometimes it is quicker and more effective to tell a student what a word means in his own language. This is especially true for basic words. What's the point in spending ages trying to explain that it is an instrument one uses to write with in ink...what's ink?... it's the liquid that goes in this instrument to write with... when you can say "stylo"?

On the other hand, teacher who speaks your first language fluently has to be really discipline to insist on only speaking English in the classroom. But I'm sure you that would rather be taught by someone who has set the right example by showing that he practises what he preaches!

Here's how to learn English

2005-12-27T09:57:00.000+01:00

I discovered a site recently called the linguist. The founder, Steve Kauffman, asserts that he can speak nine languages and now is going to offer you the benefit of his know-how to help you learn English. Although I find his attitude a little smug, his philosophy on learning languages is absolutely right. He criticises traditional language classes based on grammar, just like me. However, he and I are both trying to earn a living from teaching languages, so it would be a little hypocritical to suggest that no language class can be beneficial. I encourage you to visit the site (Mr.Kauffman will thank me for linking to him), and read what he has to say. I confess that I will never learn nine languages like him, in fact I don't find it easy to speak just one foreign language (French). People like Mr.Kauffman are rare. His talent for learning languages is a wonderful ability to have. Alas, it's not something that can be taught. Some people are more gifted than others for learning languages. It's sad but true, and I advise you to set realistic targets. Being bilingual is not only impossible for the majority of learners (myself included), but also unnecessary.

The Linguist site makes one excellent point with which I totally agree is the fact that the more you expose yourself to language, reading, writing, speaking and listening, the more progress you will make. And that learning grammar rules has little or no impact. (see my other posts about Scrivener)

The internet has made listening and reading much easier, you can expose yourself to English all day long while your computer is running. So I had a long think yesterday about what would make a good source of useful, everyday English that you could listen to regularly to build your vocabulary and comprehension skills. And I've found the perfect solution! I found a site that produces everyday English for you to listen to, just like the English I speak, seven days a week, fifty two weeks a year, with related articles that discuss the same subjects. Want to know where to find it? It's not on thelinguist.com , it's not even on the wonderful anglais-facile.com! I'll tell you on my next post, so keep visiting...

Other students speak English badly, like me!

2005-12-23T10:48:00.000+01:00

This is reason why students complain number 2. If you are studying English in a group, your teacher will often ask you to work with a partner or in a smaller groups to discuss or plan something. "What's the use of that?" you may say. "If I practise speaking English with someone who makes the same mistakes as me, how will I make any progress?"

Well, there are several reasons why talking to another student is often better than the whole group trying to talk with the teacher. First, if there are ten people or more in your group, then the time you spend talking directly to your teacher is going to be very limited (about 10%). Talking one to one with the person sitting next to you means that you are speaking 50% of the time, thereby giving you much more practice time.

Second, in real life, there won't be a qualified English teacher carefully listening and taking notes ready to correct your every mistake. In the big wide world where people of all nationalities use English to communicate, you are going to have get by all by yourself. And making yourself understood is much more important than using the correct preposition, for example.

Yesterday in class I had one student who did not speak a word of French. Why she comes to English classes when she desperately needs to learn French, I don't know. That's not my problem. But for me, her presence in the class was a fantastic help. Why? Because the typical monolingual group tends to forget why they are attending class and do all their exercises in their mother tongue. Stupid? You bet it is. And yet I see this every week. Students get all worked up or excited about the task given so they speak about it in French! I once felt obliged to tell a group that I wasn't actually interested in their opinions, the purpose of the exercise was so they could practise English, which they seemed to have forgotten.

Anyway, having someone in the class that doesn't speak your mother tongue forces you to speak English, and if you can't find the words you wave your arms, pull funny faces, draw pictures, point at things, do anything to make them understand! That's life. I once stayed for a month with someone who didn't speak any English, and I didn't speak any French, but we got on famously, and had some very funny "conversations".

The point is, it doesn't matter if your partner in class makes the same mistakes as you. If you can make him understand, you will make anyone understand. Try to learn by heart as many correct sentences as you can before coming to class, and you will be able to build on your knowledge.
Go to my learning techniques page to see ways of improving your grammar and vocabulary before starting conversation classes.

How to evaluate your teacher

2005-12-19T10:25:00.000+01:00

My last post was about the article written by Jim Scrivener where he states that he is not sure sure whether teaching grammar is possible. How would you feel if a doctor said that he didn't really know if his treatments were effective? Or you hire an electrician to change your wiring but he can't guarantee the results? You would certainly want some kind of assurance that you would actually get something for your money. So what makes a good teacher? Results? What results? There are some institutes that offer a guarantee of success. But how do they measure success? If your ability to speak English can be measured from the results of a grammar test, then yes, it is possible to offer a guarantee. But I don't think that there are any schools that guarantee you to be able to have a ten-minute conversation with any anglophone on any subject. That would be a much better indicator of success.
I've taught hundreds of students and the success rate seems to depend on the capabilities and motivation of the student.
The ability to conjugate all the irregular verbs in English counts for nothing. Your brain stores that information in a different place to the part that makes conversation. So the only way to practice conversation, is to converse. I can't guarantee that you will speak English like me, but at least I always have something to say and an opinion on most subjects, and I think that that should be the main criteria for choosing a teacher, as well as some teaching ability and a basic knowledge of grammar(just in case).
Evaluate your teacher on how stimulating the lessons are, not on how much grammar was covered. A boring teacher will put you off learning English for life. But a lively debate will have you coming back for more.

Crisis in the English teaching business

2005-12-17T09:48:00.000+01:00

When I did my training to become an English teacher, the school recommended that we all buy a book called "Learning Teaching" by Jim Scrivener. Scrivener is an ESL teaching guru, his book is accepted as being one of the best guides for teachers available, and he writes a column for the English teaching website, onestop english. Personally, I find everything that he writes to be intelligent, realistic and practical. How surprised I was (pleasantly surprised) to read his latest article entitled, "Is it possible to teach grammar?" You can read it here.

So what does Mr.Scrivener say? In a nutshell, that he is not sure whether the grammar lessons we teach have any effect on students. For instance, after giving a lesson on comparatives - bigger than, more interesting than, he was dismayed to find that his students could find nothing wrong with the phrase "*more cheaper than...".
And I have to say that this is my experience too. We have just spent 4 weeks with a group of false beginners teaching and drilling "do you?, does he, I don't, he doesn't". But when I gave them the sentence "John doesn't have a car", they all thought that it was incorrect. A little discouraging, I must say.

This takes me back to a previous post of mine where I wrote that error correction has little or no impact on the student's ability to produce correct phrases. I wonder if Scrivener has read the book "The Lexical Approach" by Michael Lewis. Lewis made this point several years ago, and stated that most of what we teach is ineffective. While this book gives some fascinating insights into the language-learning process, it doesn't really offer any practical alternatives. (You have to fork out another 35 Euros for the sequel). So please read Scrivener's article, it is refreshingly modest for such a senior figure in the world of ESL. Then visit my pages on tips for learning, bons conseils for practical techniques such as mind-maps and songs.

Excuse me, where is the pressing?

2005-12-16T14:58:00.000+01:00

Have a look at what a French speaker of English might say:
Pressing? - Yes the pressing. I am staying at the camping and I need to go to the pressing to have clothes cleaned. I took me ages to find a parking and now my wife is at the hairdressers having a brushing. Then we are going footing in the hills and after that we might go and do some fooding with some friends.

Pressing, footing, camping, parking, brushing, footing and fooding are pseudo English that don't exist in English. At least they don't have the same meaning as in French. It seems to me that words that end in ing are popular in French because they can be immediately recognised as being of anglo-saxon origin, and thus a little more exotic.

This trend has led to the wrong word being used, and an English speaker might be confused when listening to what a French person believes to be correct English.Pressing means in English the action of pressing something and could certainly be used in the sense of ironing clothes. But I take my suits to a dry cleaners, not a pressing. A woman goes to the hairdresser's to have a cut and blow-dry, not a brushing. I would go running for exercise, a footing is somewhere to put my feet, if I lose my footing, I fall over. I go camping, and I put my tent up in a campsite. When a shop or hotel informs me that there is plenty of parking, that means that there is a car park. As for "fooding", I'm sorry I have no idea. Could someone explain?

There are a few "bons amis", however, "marketing" and "shopping" are useful words that have more or less the same meaning in English. Shopping is much more general in English, you go shopping at the supermarket as well as the boutiques, and when you have no intention of buying anything, or have no money, you would go window-shopping.

Why students complain : reason 1

2005-12-14T13:30:00.000+01:00

The first reason students give for not being happy with their class is, "My teacher never corrects our mistakes when we speak. How are we supposed to know if our English is correct if the teacher doesn't tell us?" A good point, you might think, and is not uncommon among my students. Well, I'm gonna tell you a secret. We do correct your mistakes, you just don't realise it! Personally, I hate it when I'm speaking French and the person that I'm talking to keeps interrupting me to tell me that what I just said isn't right. And you know what? Even if I try really hard to make a mental note of my mistake so as not to repeat it, I just go right on and make the same mistake 20 seconds later. What's the lesson here? That error correction is virtually useless. I know, I'm a teacher and I shouldn't say things like that, it will give the profession a bad reputation, but that's how it is.
There's a contradiction here, you may say. Didn't I just say that we do correct your mistakes without you realising it? Yes I did. This is how: we use something called
reformulation and this is how it works-
Teacher: "What did you do last weekend?"
Student: "I go to Paris for see my brother"
Teacher: "That's interesting, you went to Paris to see your brother? What did you do?"
Student: "We go to the cinema."
Teacher: "You went to the cinema, what did you see?"

and so on. This is much better than, "sorry, what did you say?, did you say 'I go'? What tense should we be using here, the present or the past? That's right, the past. And how to we say 'go' in the past? You don't know? It's 'went'. So last weekend I went to Paris..."

After this kind of error correction the student has forgotten what he was talking about, and the conversation dies. In order for you the student to benefit from reformulation, use your ears, and listen to the correct language your teacher is using. You will be correcting your own mistakes slowly, over a period of time, if you pay attention, and in a much more agreeable way.

Why do we say "I'm on the bus"?

2005-12-10T14:16:00.000+01:00

I always hearing you students complaining that English is so illogical. Not to me it isn't! Any foreign language is going to seem illogical when we compare it to our own. We grew up with our mother tongue (that's why it's called mother tongue, by the way), so of course it seems natural and logical to us.

You just can't get used to expressions like "on the bus" because it seems stupid. I'm not ON the bus,you say, like sitting on the roof, I'm IN the bus! And then you anglophones go and make it even more complicated by saying that you are IN a car, not on a car. What the hell am I supposed to make of that? OK, calm down, I'll try to explain.

You know that there is a lexical item in English that most people call a phrasal verb. You know, normally a little verb followed by a preposition, like wake up, break down, etc. Well the verb get takes every preposition. And very often, the verb get is used to indicate a change of state:
I was in bed
I get up
Now I am up (ie, not in bed any more)

I was single
I get married
Now I am married. (to get married isn't a phrasal verb, but you get the point, dont you?)

And so it is : I was on the pavement, I get on the bus, so now I am on the bus. So the change of state here is going from the ground to somewhere higher, which you can understand because in French we say monter, like go up or climb.

If you still can't see the logic, that's too bad, but it won't cause you any problems if you take the attitude "that's how it is in English, I can't change it, so I'll have to accept it". The best learners, like children, have this positive, accepting attitude. The poor learner lets these kind of questions stop him or her from making progress. C'est comme ça!

How do you pronounce the letter "I" in English words?

2005-12-08T16:42:00.000+01:00

That's a difficult question to answer. English is notoriously bad for keeping to set rules of pronunciation. Some might say that there aren't any rules at all. There are, however,a few guidelines that may help you to guess, so here goes. Basically, there are two sounds for the letter "I" short /I/ like in hit, ship, sick and long /ai/ like in time, smile, wine, white, site. Can you see anything in common in each set of words? Notice that in the first set, the i is followed either by one or two consonants, but no vowels. In the second set, the consonant after the i is followed by a vowel. This vowel softens and lengthens the i to /ai/ (which rhymes with "eye", by the way). The many exceptions to this guideline are normally due to the strong/weak alternation in intonation. A good example would be divide, which is pronounce /dIvaid/, the stress (accent tonique) being on the final syllable. This is complicated stuff, don't worry if you are more confused now than you were before you began reading. Just keep listening to English every day and you will learn to pronounce words naturally.

English words you didn't know you knew (part 1)

2005-12-07T13:31:00.000+01:00

Less than one week, and I'm already running out of things to write. So I've started looking in the dictionary to supply you with words that at first sight you would think are good anglo-saxon words but which are in reality French words, just changed a little to look like anglo-saxon ones.

For example, do you know what a curfew is? It's restriction that government puts on people being out of doors after a certain time at night, and normally happens only during war or times of civil unrest. That's right, curfew is my miserable attempt to pronounce the word couvre-feu in English. There are lots more: jewellery is joaillery, parly is parler, and meager is maigre. You'll get more of these in the days and weeks to come.

American or British?

2005-12-03T15:58:00.000+01:00

Which English do you speak? Many people in France were taught what they believe to be British English, because that's what their teachers studied. That would be logical, as Britain is the nearest English-speaking country to France and thus the most important in terms of travel, trade, etc. However, I hear a lot of people today claiming that they can speak two foreign languages, English and American! That's like me saying I can speak Parisian French and Marseillais. Sure, there are some vocabulary differences, but most English speakers can understand each other, whether they are British, American, Australian or Indian. The pronunciation differences might cause some problems on occasions, just like in any language. When I see people from Quebec being interviewed on French TV, there are usually subtitles!

I am in complete agreement with the American practice of simplifying spelling - as if learning a language isn't hard enough without illogical spellings. So whereas in British we write favour, neighbour, colour the Americans write favor, neighbor, color, and when we write theatre, centre, they write theater, center.

As far as vocabulary goes, you just have to learn two words instead of one. But if you have a British teacher and you watch American movies, you will quickly get used to the differences.

have a look at british/american dictionary for more resources.

Why is "I" always written with a capital letter?

2005-12-02T14:57:00.000+01:00

The first person subject pronoun, "I", is always written in uppercase (majuscule). In French and most other languages it is written just like all the other pronouns. I spent ages this morning (it's my day off) trying to find a decent explanation, without much success. The most common theory is that when the old English "Ich" (like in German) became reduced to "I" it was thought to be too small and insignificant to be a real word and could easily get attached to the end or beginning of another word. So scribes and later printers took the habit of capitalising it. If you have another explanation, let me know. In emails and text messages the lowercase "i" is now becoming common. Personally, i don't approve!

Have or Have Got?

2005-12-01T12:27:00.000+01:00

A colleague showed me a website with grammar exercises based on the difference between "have" and "have got". Apparently, the teacher who wrote the exercises, who is British, thinks that the question, "do you have?" is an Americanism that is not acceptable to speakers of British English. So when presented with a choice between (a)"Do you have a car?" and (b)"have you a got a car?" the exercise will tell that only (b) is correct. It's no surprise that students of English are always obsessed with learning grammar rules when the teachers themselves keep making life unnecessarily complicated. Both are correct. In fact, "do you have" is probably more correct than "have you got" because it follows the standard rule for asking questions - "do you want?", "does he need?", "do they go?", etc.

I used to correct students when they would say 'have you a pen?' thinking that the two options above were the only right ones. But on reflection, this form comes up all the time in Dickens, Austen, the Brontes etc, and occasionally today. So why not? It's easy to understand and doesn't break any rules, so if you feel like using it, go ahead.