A friend of mine is concerned about my use of emoticons in texts. She thinks it may be a sign of an imminent mid-life crisis. LOL. I HEART emoticons. Look at that huge yellow face with massive hands on the left…what’s not to love? 😕
Monthly Archives: June 2013
An English Empire? Linguistic Imperialism and me.
When I completed my CELTA (the initial training course for EFL teachers) and considered all the places in the world I wanted to travel to and teach in, I faced some, half-joking, accusations that what I was about to do aided some covert imperialist agenda. Was I a modern-day missionary, an ELT evangelist preaching Received Pronunciation, sermonising about sentence structure, bearing witness to SVO word order? Was I an unwitting foot soldier in the building of a new English Empire, annihilating native languages, crushing cultures, promulgating Western capitalist ideals?
Language Play – Alliteration and Rhyme
Persuasion, poems, puns. We use language to connect, to communicate, to conceal; for literature and laughs. From the time we begin to babble as babies language play is something we all do. Here are some of our favourite no materials, no preparation, rhyming and alliteration games. Continue reading
Repetition and Rhetoric
When people send me their work for editing they most often ask me to check for repetition. There seems to be a general fear of repeating words and phrases in writing and an idea that we must always find synonyms, which are plentiful in English.
EFL Extensive Reading
In EFL we talk about two types of reading Extensive Reading and Intensive Reading. Intensive reading is what usually happens in the classroom: reading to answer comprehension questions or to teach ‘reading skills’ such as skimming and scanning. Extensive reading is reading for pleasure, often fiction at around or just below a learner’s language level. Ideally extensive reading texts should be 98% known vocabulary.
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