Every once in a while and more often than one would think, a conversation starts about food. The triggers are various. In my case, as I have changed my diet a year ago, and don’t eat certain things (actually mainly two things), questions sometimes arise when this gets noticed. Continue reading
One of my favorite newspaper columns is Oliver Burkeman’s This Column will Change Your Life that he writes for the Guardian Weekly. The texts are short and poignant, the topics often refreshingly provocative and thus great for classroom discussions.
His column from February 2, 2014 is about our nostalgic tendency to believe in the past everything was better. Depending on the age of the person reminiscing, this could be any decade. What unites them all, according to Mr Burkeman, is that the person praising the respective time (and complaining about how things have changed since ‘then’ – and not to the better) was around seven at the time.
Thoughts on correcting someone while speaking
(edited July 2024)
This morning in class, the question of correcting came up again.
A colleague, who subbed for me while I was on vacation, seems to have a noticeably different practice from my own concerning ‘corrections’ and three of us started talking about this after class. They asked me if I could correct them more. My colleague was said to have corrected them quite extensively.
The issue of correcting someone while speaking raises a lot of questions. Most importantly: How do we learn? But also: what is it that we are actually learning? What is or should be in focus? Continue reading
Modality (2)
In the first post on modality, I only covered the forms referring to a future activity:
We should leave soon.
We could go to the cinema.
She might come tomorrow.
You can/may go now.
I would like to go now.
I will go now.
We can also use modality with past time reference if we need or want to. Continue reading
On the page The Verb Structure Circle, I discussed the four basic building blocks of the English verb: the simple forms 1 (so-called ‘simple present’) and 2 (so-called ‘simple past’) and the aspects continuous and perfect.
What this basic approach to English verb structures does not cover is modality. What is modality? Continue reading
Last week the topic of the ‘seven sins’ came up again (see post from 25. June 2013). We had been reading about a general decline in the sales of soft drinks. In this connection, the topic of the attempted ban of XXL drinks in New York City came up. The question arose why anyone would buy such large drinks in the first place, instead of maybe buying a second if you still wanted more after the first (smaller) one. The ‘History of Supersizing‘ provides an answer: we seem so have a tendency not to take seconds so as to not appear piggish. Thus, if marketers want people to buy more of their drink, they have to increase the size of one. (revised December 2021)
Continue readingLink for 2024 The World Ahead 2024 from The Economist
Link for 2023 The World in 2023 – what to expect
Every year, the British magazine The Economist publishes a special issue that focuses on the events of the coming year. They write about upcoming events, things that might, could or will happen, and report on how on-the-spot their predictions for the previous year were.
This year, their selection of events around the world (Calendar 2014, p 32) was accompanied by a wonderful illustration by Kevin Kallaugher, their editorial cartoonist, and … Continue reading
Last week, a little news item seemed to cause quite some stir. As it was one of the leading articles on the BBC web site, I couldn’t fail to notice it too. There was a warning of watching the accompanying video, as the images could be disturbing:
Recently we read an article in class on the mayor of New York City’s attempt to ban the sale of supersized soft drinks. In January, the city’s health board “passed a ban on serving sodas and other sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces (0.5 l) in restaurants and cinemas” (Moya Irvine in Read On , January 2013, p 1).
We discussed the pro and con arguments and related issues like causes of obesity, our own eating and drinking habits, general lifestyle issues etc. According to Moya Irvine, the main parties against the ban were those who feared Continue reading
On the weekend, I read an article in the German FAZ ( ‘Der Unsinn des Home Office’) about the pro and cons of working from home versus working at the office.
It describes a study with which researchers wanted to find out who worked more efficiently: someone working alone, or people working in a team. They gave a group of students the task of enveloping letters. Some of them were paired up, others worked alone. Those in the team enveloped more letters than those who worked alone. Continue reading
As mentioned in my last post that eventually took a different direction, I was looking for the article in which I had read about an increasing worry among experts from different realms over possible consequences of income inequality or disparity. And I found it: it was a (German) newspaper article reporting the findings of the annual survey on global risk assessment conducted by the WEF and summarized in their ‘Global Risks‘ report. Continue reading
New Technologies and how they have changed or are changing our lives has been a recurring theme over the last years. This year a new term popped up: the google effect.
Last year, we discussed a study that intended to explore the effect that easily available information accessible via digital devices like smartphones might have on people’s mind or ways of thinking and memorizing. Study participants were asked how many countries’ flags had only one color. Continue reading
Every year around the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year the same topics pop up. Some I love to take up on, others I try to avoid. However, similar to the taboo topics I wrote about in my last post, those I try to avoid most have the tendency to hop up and down in my mind, forcing me to at least mention them in a class. It’s a little like the things we try hard to forget: the harder the attempt the more likely unpleasant moments are to sneak back into our memories. Continue reading
One of my basic teaching or training principles and aims is to create a situation in which ‘meaningful communication’ takes place. What is meant by ‘meaningful communication’? This is one of my main tasks – and sometimes challenges – in every class, and the main thing to find out when getting to know new groups and new students: what are they interested in as individuals and what are their interests (and needs) in respect to the context in which or for which they intend to improve their language skills – in companies their respective jobs. In short, what is meaningful in any given situation. Continue reading
All parts summarizing the basic forms and combinations of the English verb structure system have been put together under the page The Verb Structure Circle, the single posts have been deleted (as I suspect them to be the reason for the page not showing correctly when using Internet Explorer 9; I read that word press blogs don’t show there when bits and pieces have been copied and pasted into posts from Office Word, which I have done with the slides.)
A reflection on my own principles
It was our end of the summer tennis season get together at an Italian restaurant. I arrived later as I had a late evening class and one of my team mates asked me where exactly I had been or came from so late and we got into talking a little about my job. One of the questions she asked me after a while was if I had a concept – for a lay person maybe not comprehensible, but I was totally overwhelmed by this question at that moment, and not only because I was tired. I didn’t want to be rude by answering too briefly and I didn’t want to appear as if I had no clue of what I was doing and why.
The time around the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century is known as the era of industrial development and numerous inventions. In France, it was also a time of great literary and artistic activity. From one of the writers living in these times is the following extract:
Every once in a while I like to show groups how the internet can be used to integrate more English into your everyday life, plus just plain interesting stuff worth talking about, watching or listening to.
Below are some of my favorites that I have also listed or mentioned in other posts.
In the end, one of our group brought a page of his interest (I love it when class participants do that), including copies for reading. It was Louis C.K.’s explanation of why he hates smartphones. Continue reading
In this next passage, we leave Europe and go to the other side of the Atlantic. This author is considered a very special one in many respects. The so-called New World has now been settled for some time, but American literature, what we consider ‘genuine’ American, is still fairly new. James Fenimoore Cooper has generally been acknowledged with being the first to have written novels exclusively set in an American landscape, depicting the early settlement experience of mostly European settlers, taking a critical view on their often disrespectful and brutal treatment of nature and the original inhabitants of the continent.
The following, though, is not from one of Cooper’s novels.
This well-known American author was one of the earliest American writers of short stories, and one of the first in the US who tried to make a living through writing. He is largely considered the inventor of the detective story, but is probably better known for his gothic fantasies.