| Knock knock! | Knock knock! | Knock knock! |
| Who’s there? | Who’s there? | Who’s there? |
| Cows go | Little old lady | Europe |
| Cows go, who? | Little old lady who? | Europe who? |
| No, silly, cows go MOO! | I didn’t know you could yodel! | You’re so childish! |
Everyone knows the benefits of reading to babies and toddlers, right? Health visitors hand out Bookstart packs in the UK almost as soon as your child is born, libraries run all-singing, all-dancing, glue & glitter sessions for families; Dolly Parton posts books monthly to children in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia. And the results from research is overwhelming: a child is never too young for a book. Read more
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? 😕
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?
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. Read more
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.
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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My week has been punctuated erratically by the ping of my inbox informing me of the arrival of a draft document for editing or proofreading. I have spent several happy evenings with my green pencil* scribbling notations across freshly printed pages as I consider questions of punctuation.
My daughter, Lyra, is learning a poem for a school poetry competition. She wanders around the house muttering lines and rhymes to herself, making up new ones when she forgets the original (which she often does).
Listening to Lyra’s evident enjoyment of the poem I began to wonder what it is about rhyme that we find so appealing.