Archive for May, 2012
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Posted by Liz Potter on May 17, 2012
In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about how to spell the inflections of verbs like commit. Don’t write the -ed [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on May 15, 2012
English has a variety of options for when we want to express contrition or remorse. We can say we’re sorry, we apologise, we regret something. We can emphasise it by saying ‘I’m so/very/really/truly/awfully sorry’, and so on. Or we can just say ‘Apologies’. Convention dictates in part how this and other ritualised speech acts take [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on May 14, 2012
The Eurozone crisis claimed another victim on 6 May when Nicolas Sarkozy became the eleventh European political leader to lose his job since 2008. His opponent, François Hollande, has become only the second socialist president of the French Fifth Republic. This change of presidency has been seen by some as a “lurch to the left”. [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter on May 11, 2012
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit [...]
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Posted by Laine Redpath Cole on May 10, 2012
We are constantly monitoring the language to ensure that we keep an up-to-date record. You can be a part of this enterprise by suggesting a word for our Open Dictionary. Every Thursday Laine Redpath-Cole picks a new entry and goes on about it for a bit. This week’s word is: gender reveal (noun) the practice [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter on May 10, 2012
In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are based on areas of English (e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc) which learners often find difficult. This week’s language tip is about the patterns that follow the noun possibility. The noun possibility is never followed [...]
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Posted by Gill Francis on May 09, 2012
Gill Francis is a freelance language consultant and writer of resources for teachers and learners of English. Her latest project is Skylight, an easy-to-use online corpus access tool (for login details, email gillian.francis@blueyonder.co.uk). _____________ When someone says ‘preposition’ and ‘language change’ in the same breath, you would be forgiven if your eyes glaze over. Prepositions [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on May 08, 2012
English has a jumbled inheritance of words from many sources; the pie chart shows a statistical analysis based on dictionary etymologies. Even simple contrasting word pairs, such as in and out, may come from different sources: in is a Latinate word, and out is Germanic. Despite their disparate origins, you can usually count on words [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on May 07, 2012
The Pennsylvania-based artist and illustrator, Victor Stabin has sent us a copy of his delightful book Daedal Doodle. It’s an ‘ABC’ for kids learning the alphabet – but with a difference. Books of this type usually employ familiar objects and animals (‘A is for Apple, B is for Bear’ and so on), but this one [...]
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Posted by Liz Potter on May 04, 2012
This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular. Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit [...]
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