Many are familiar with the semi-modal ‘used to’ for exressing habits someone used to have in the past, but stopped doing at some point in time.
Classic example: He used to smoke, (but quit some years ago).
However, used to is not the only possible choice for expressing past habits.
Continue readingDo you know what a finial is? In one of the Spotlight issues from 2020, Judith Gilbert, writer, editor and translator, wrote a little column titled ‘Words for Nerds’. Here she lists a number of words most people probably never heard of, and which demonstrate that it is impossible to know all the words of any language. They are all nouns denoting special little items of everyday life. See if you can find out what they are with the help of internet images. Do you know the term for the thing in your own native language?
Continue readingThe 94th Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 27. Again a little later than its pre-pandemic February date. If you like to learn more about the award itself, wikipedia is the place to go.
This year’s nomination ceremony has already taken place and can be watched on youtube.
I always like going through the Oscar nomination ballot sheet that lists all categories and films. It offers great general vocabulary practice, not just specifically film related. Going through the titles, finding out if anyone has already watched some of the nominated films, looking at trailers and synopsies of the films – all this I always find quite enjoyable even if – in most cases – we haven’t seen so many of the films.
Continue readingOne of my favorite TED talks is Dan Buettner’s How to Live to be 100. In this talk, he introduces us to places where a relatively high number of people live to be a hundred years old and more. He and his team, in cooperation with National Geographic, went to find out why these areas they called Blue Zones had more centennarians than others.
Continue readingBelow you find the link to a text that discusses changes in companies’ or employers’ attitudes towards the working conditions they offer their employees. How voluntary or not these changes are is a question worth discussing.
During the last two years, a phenomenon called the Great Resignation has been spreading. I believe it started in the US, but also seems to be affecting companies in other countries. It assumedly started during the pandemic and seems to have been triggered by the radically enforced changes in peoples’ lives. Their is a wikipedia entry devoted to the phenomenon Great Resignation that could be read in connection with the text below.
Some of the questions worth discussing in connection with the Great Resignation:
Continue readingI have a quizcard board game called Quiztimate that I liked playing every once in a while in groups before we went online. Many of the questions led to further discussions on the respective topic a question referred to, which for me is the main point of all quizzes: hoping the questions are so interesting that we can talk about them, not just go for finding the correct answer.
I have found that online people are more likely to sneak out of a conversation whose aim it is to think together and discuss possible answers to questions, and instead go for ‘instant gratification’, or what psychologists and neuro-scientists call the google affect – my biggest enemy 😉
For playing online, I have scanned some cards, 9 per round; the answers will be in a separate post, perhaps. If I forget to do that, try to find the answers via internet research. But only AFTER having exhausted all conversational solution generating processes!
Continue readingSome learners of English struggle with the two participles used as adjectives. In the continuous and perfect verb structures, the main verb occurs in one of the never-changing forms called participles. To give some examples:
Continue readingNew music download patterns appear to closely resemble epidemic curves for infectious disease, study finds
The text below is about a study that describes how music seems to spread similar to infectious diseases. Before reading, discuss the questions and look at the selected words
Continue readingAn all time great topic are song texts. However, the choice of song is not unimportant. I like to choose songs everyone knows with lyrics most people don’t. There has to be a little mystery and surprise concerning the text, something special about it.
In this respect, the song below definitely qualifies.
Continue readingBelow you find a list of sentences with mistakes learners of English have made or commonly make. Some are more common than others, but all of them touch upon certain ‘problem’ areas, though not all of them are so wrong that they would lead to misunderstandings in communication.
I regularly add to the list, therefore it has gotten pretty long. I would not recommend going through all sentences at once.
Continue readingRecently I bought a poster: 250 Top Movies Bucket List. I had it hung on my wall and was accordingly asked by some course participants what it was they were seeing. The single movie titles were too small for them to identify over my camera, but they were interested and some wanted to find out how many they actually knew.
I found a page that shows them all. And below I put some quiz questions together. Each sentence hints to one of the films. But before you guess the films: do you know the origin of the term bucket list?
Continue readingBelow you find an article from the New York Times about one of their newly published games. You find some pre-reading preparatory vocabulary exercise first, followed by an adapted version of the article and a link to the original.
Continue readingPosted on February 1, 2022
This topic came up rather spontaneously in one of my advanced classes and definitely relates to a more advanced language issue. I wanted to post the topic anyhow. But since we haven’t yet finished with our language exploration, I will divide the post up in two parts. The second part will reveal the grammar point in question and elaborate a little.
In the text from The Case of a Tennis Player you find the sentence:
Judge Anthony Kelly’s ruling that Novak Djokovic be freed to contest the Australian Open overruled the government’s insistence that he should be barred for failing to prove he is exempt from being inoculated against Covid-19.
It was the BE in be freed that was unfamiliar, and the questions asked were: Why not is freed or should be freed?
Let’s do some language exploration to see if we can find out what kind of structure this is, and if we can find some similar patterns. Glosbe.com is a great web site for that.
Continue readingA huge part of any learning process lies in repetition: doing something over and over again until whatever skill you wanted to learn has been internalized.
Though most participants in my classes are more interested in using what they already can, i.e. speaking with each other, communicating ideas, discussing issues etc. there might still be some need for additional practice in form of repetition. However, what do we mean by that? What kind? What kinds of activities might be useful, or more useful than others in language learning? Learning a language is not quite the same as learning a skill like a new figure in dancing or an instrument.
Continue reading
Some time ago, I stumbled over claims made on the internet that spinach (and other vegetables) had more protein than meat. Though I’m positively sure this not to be the case, I continued searching for such claims – you never know. And as we do need to cut back on meat consumption of the mass produced kind, getting more of your protein from vegetables is a good thing, right?
(For all those who know me a little, this is not so much about nutrition and health and all, it’s more about numbers, and how rumours get started 😉
Continue readingI have been going through my older posts. One of my favorite classroom activities in the past was to hand out little excerpts or passages from classic literature and have my participants guess what they were. I chose stories that I knew or at least suspected everyone to ‘somehow’ know.
(Further down you will find a spoiler alert as in this post you find the answers to the excerpts. Do not continue reading on from there if you still want to go through the six classics you find in separate posts under the category ‘Guess the Classic’).
Continue readingIf 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!).
Continue readingOne great benefit of online teaching is the ability to share the internet. I have used this a lot. We played online escape rooms together, shared and discussed articles, images and charts, Ted talks, you tube videos etc.
In one session, using google maps, we went to our respective homes. We went to Spanish villages, home towns in Germany or the US; in one session we looked at the respective places people live at currently in Hannover. We ‘showed’ a new employee around the city, introduced her to places to see, or things to do. It was quite enjoyable and sometimes also fairly personal when we shared background stories of where our families live or lived, why some of us wanted to move or were not happy with where they lived.
Looking around via street view offers a special experience, an experience that can be supplemented by a few rounds of Geoguessr.
