From the category archives:

Improve Your English

‘The 21st Century Flux’ worksheets

February 23, 2010

You may recall that a little while ago we promised you some downloadable worksheets to use with Dizraeli’s video, The 21st Century Flux, about the English language. Well, the worksheets are now ready for you to download and use in your classroom. The lyrics are also available as downloadable pdf.
The worksheets have been devised by [...]

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King’s English

October 26, 2009

I’ve had an enlightening week reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I’ve avoided his books – and most of the resulting movies – all my reading/watching life, as …  well, I’m hellishly easy to scare (seriously, Ghostbusters scared me senseless). But his approach and his advice is straight-up and liberating rather [...]

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The Collective Corrective

July 15, 2009

Collective nouns are tricky beasts. Or is the concept of collective nouns a tricky beast?
The question of whether a collective noun requires a singular or plural verb to agree with it is one many find difficult to grasp, including myself, but then I have the mighty brains of the dictionary team here to help me. [...]

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Adverbs Still Have Something To Add (To Verbs)

July 9, 2009

Adverbs are lovely. Except lovely is an adjective.
Now I love snooker, but there’s one aspect to watching it on television that drives me potty. Certain commentators on the BBC, who shall remain nameless, have got into the habit of acting as if adverbs don’t exist, continually saying such things as: “He’s hit that one terrible” [...]

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Translators and Dictionaries

June 15, 2009

As a translator, I use dictionaries nearly every day. But contrary to what many people might believe, I don’t simply look up words in a bilingual dictionary and then write down the first definition offered. Translation is about much more than approximately equivalent words. That’s why actual people are needed to carry out translation, rather [...]

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Purses & wallets: corpus sex differences

May 18, 2009

In the English class, teachers can make use of internet search engines to answer students’ linguistic queries such as:
“Which is more common – look after yourself or take care of yourself?”
In the following pie chart, figures refer to the number of Google hits obtained by running a web search of these two items:
Of course, the [...]

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Six things in six minutes

May 11, 2009

I am always on the lookout for new and interesting sites for my students or student-teachers. When I heard that the Macmillan Dictionary had just gone online, I thought it would be worth taking a look. Being an English teacher, teacher trainer, materials writer and occasional blogger though, my time is somewhat at a premium. [...]

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Two short legs and a silly point: learn (about) English through cricket. Part 3: terminology

April 29, 2009

Which is the more difficult word: take or encephalomyelitis? Most people would pick the second one – but a lexicographer wouldn’t. For dictionary-writers, words like encephalomyelitis are easy because they only have one meaning, and it can be defined with complete accuracy. The really difficult words are go, take, get, and similar high-frequency items which [...]

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Two short legs and a silly point: learn (about) English through cricket. Part 2: Origins

April 2, 2009

First, a little history to set the scene. We think of cricket as a very ‘English’ game, and nowadays it’s mainly played in parts of the former British empire: Australasia, the Indian subcontinent, South Africa, and the Caribbean. But its history is more complex. In a recent novel, Netherland, the protagonist is a Wall Street [...]

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Two short legs and a silly point: learn (about) English through cricket

March 24, 2009

Cricket is the most quintessentially English game, but is famously incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been brought up with it. (The phrase in the title here makes perfect sense to an aficionado of the game but could easily be misinterpreted by anyone else.) George W. Bush – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – [...]

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