If you check my concept of The Verb Structure Circle, you will find that it does not deal with modality; it focusses on the four basic forms of the English verb and the various combinations possible among them. An additional page deals with modality.
This post relates to a lesson on modality we recently had in one of my groups and is meant to summarize what we discussed there with some additional elaborations.
Continue readingI always tell my students to be careful whenever they resort to their native language to understand a new word they have encountered. One big disadvantage of online classes is that you cannot really stop people from ‘googling’ a word they don’t know or are not sure about by checking a translation site (hoping to get a ‘quick fix’ I guess).
Continue readingThough I am still online, I feel that with the end of the pandemic I need to overhaul my blog. Maybe even choose a new theme. Especially Viral Times and Useful Lesson Links read like diaries of the last three years. I don’t want to delete anything, I am glad I have this document of the past three years. But now, 2023, I feel I need to change things.
I will try to restructure those parts and topics that can be used as lesson plans, reduce the number of categories and try to make this whole thing more useful – not just for myself. It has become too crammed and needs to be made more practical
Teams backgrounds – not a fan
Microsoft Teams has several useful functions, and I enjoy using the platform for my online classes. As already mentioned several times in other post, my absolute favorite is the possibility to share – almost anything – with my course participants.
But then there is the so-called background effect. In the beginning, when we ‘teamed up’ online, I found this function useful as well, even funny at times, when people became creative with their own background images (one of them created a background that made him look like he was sitting in a Star Wars spaceship – spectacular!).
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