This morning we discussed my verb structure circle system (see under pages) in one of my classes. It was, again, as I found, a very interesting discussion. There seems to be one point of misunderstanding, though, when I question the validity of right or wrong claims: my position is not ‘anything goes’ and ‘rules don’t matter’. Continue reading
I’m on vacation and it seems when I am on vacation, so is my blog. I have spent the last week on the wonderful North Sea island of Amrum. The weather was great, as has been the last weeks in Germany.
For this week, I am in England and the weather is just as fine as it was on Amrum. So my blog’s vacation will continue.
Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the morning, rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere. Hundreds must have seen it, and taken it for an ordinary falling star. Albin described it as leaving a greenish streak behind it that glowed for some seconds. Denning, our greatest authority on meteorites, stated that the height of its first appearance was about ninety or one hundred miles. It seemed to him that it fell to earth about one hundred miles east of him. Continue reading
(Updated September 3)
The topic of food keeps coming up in my classes. Though I do believe (or hope) it does so, because everybody is always interested in a topic so essential to everyday life and survival, it’s probably me being on a mission having read all these books and articles recently.
So here is a list of what I have been reading – in addition to the web sites linked to in my post on food pyramids: Continue reading
Should you ever have forgotten your bag with all your teaching plans and materials at home, don’t panic, ask your group if anybody would stop working if they won a substantial sum of money that would exempt them from having to work for a living.
A variation on the theme is to consider how much money would be necessary in order to be able to stop working. And this is where the discussions sometimes get really interesting, and the topic touches upon all kinds of themes related to everyday life (and is thus also great for revising basic vocabulary.) Continue reading
Did you recognize Classic (2)? Most readers remember the whitewash scene. There have been quite a few film adaptations and I must admit that one of my favorites actually is the German TV series made in the 70ies.
The next one is a little more recent than the first two; a novel from the first half of the 20th century of which there are two film adaptations as far as I know.
The Ministry of Truth — Minitrue, in Newspeak* — was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: Continue reading
What is more important: fluency or accuracy? I’m aware of the artificiality of the opposition. It makes no sense to set the two against each other. There is no either – or.
However, the two concepts do sometimes seem to linger in the minds of foreign language speakers. Every once in a while there are participants in class who hardly say anything. Now this may just be due to the nature of their personality: they are less imposing or more laid back, prefer to listen to others before they utter their own opinion etc. Continue reading
The translation you get from googling ‘Sollbruchstelle’ is predetermined breaking point. However, when I googled that phrase to find out more, not much came up. In English, as I eventually found out, the phenomenon of manufacturers intentionally limiting a products lifespan is called ‘planned obsolescence’. A ‘pre-determined breaking point’ in any case is just one means to an end of achieving what the wider term of planned obsolescence describes. So from a linguistic point, one is the sub-category of the other, i.e. the two terms stand in a hierarchical semantic relationship to each other.
The Pons dictionary definition of ‘obsolescence’ is: the state of becoming old-fashioned and no longer useful (=becoming obsolete). ‘Planned obsolescence’ as a term encompasses more than just the printer that stops working after so and so many pages, but also marketing strategies of short lived fashion design (e.g. clothes and cars). Continue reading
In the beginning minutes of class meetings, we sometimes talk about the weather – actually ‘rather often’ would be a more accurate description. But us being in Germany, this might not be so surprising as the weather changes all the time, and not just by nuances (talking about the weather in Florida might be less entertaining). Continue reading
The Marshall McLuhan Test
Marshall McLuhan, (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian philosopher of communication theory. His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.[1][2] McLuhan is known for coining the expressions the medium is the message and the global village, and for predicting the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented. (from wikipedia).
I came across the so-called Marshall McLuhan test while reading and browsing through the Guardian web page. Charlotte Stretch mentions it in her post on the Guardian’s books blog. She refers to John Sutherland, who asks in his book How to Read a Novel: A User’s Guide how we choose which books to read since there are so many novels, new ones being published every day? Our time is limited. Even if we spent all of it reading… I once calculated how many books I could manage to read in the rest of my remaining days if I, say, for example, read two 300 pagers a week. Continue reading
This one always turned out to be the easiest, or the second easiest.
Now the next: Continue reading
Revised October 2024, adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a classification of objectionable vices (part of Christian ethics) that have been used since early Christian times to educate and instruct Christians concerning fallen humanity’s tendency to sin. The currently recognized version of the sins are usually given as… Continue reading
Would you like to find out how large your vocabulary is and/or get some extra vocabulary practice? Go to Vocabularysize.com and take the test created by researchers at Victoria University of Wellington.
Research has shown that the vast majority of words are learned in and from context. So the more you expose yourself to the language, the more your vocabulary will grow. Besides listening, reading is one of the keys to vocabulary growth. So read, read, read – especially things that interest you, that you enjoy, or that are in any way meaningful to you.
I personally enjoy fiction. Though I know not everybody does, I do like to integrate fictional literature into my classes every once in a while. One of my favorite ‘exercises’ is ‘Guess the novel’: I copy pages from well-known classics and have the group read and guess what novels or stories the pages are from. Interestingly, even if they haven’t read the book, in most cases they are able to come up with the correct answer as those I pick seem to have their place in something like a collective consciousness.
Below is one such excerpt. One word in the text proved to be a total give-away, so I shortened it to two initial letters. Continue reading
Youtube has evolved from being a forum for private videos to a platform where all kinds of institutions publish their visual material. Here one of my favorites is TED.
A student of mine showed me a talk given by Colin Stokes (How Movies Teach Manhood). Our classroom has access to the internet and we watched and discussed it together. In the mean time I have shown it to other groups as well.
Colin Stokes talks about his experience as a father Continue reading
‘Food’ is a topic that always comes up at some time during a course in various forms. Sometimes it is just a vocabulary issue: course members ask to review food vocabulary for example because they have guests from abroad and would like to explain their company’s menu. What we have often done was to simply get copies of the menu of the week and start translating, realizing how difficult even the translation of food vocabulary can sometimes be, especially when it comes to fancy menu names. (This would normally be the place where I would relate my famous food translation anecdote, but I will refrain from that for now, suffice it to say it involves turkeys and patrols).
And it’s always nice to have some pictures. Continue reading
What is grammar?
Whenever you ask this question, e.g. in a first year Introduction to Linguistics course or to learners of English, the first reaction is often one of bafflement. Isn’t the answer rather obvious? Tenses, prepositions, if-clauses: all the stuff you were supposed to learn in school.
When I ask adult learners of English, which area of grammar they feel they have the most problems with or feel they need more practice in, they most often answer: tenses – closely followed by prepositions. The first year linguistic student as well as most learners of English equate ‘grammar’ with verb structures or ‘the tenses’. Especially in a German context there seems to be a certain obsession with ‘tenses.’ And many learners of English worry about getting the ‘tenses’ right, even students I consider quite advanced. Although, when asked, most agree that vocabulary is much more important than correct ‘grammar’, there seems to be a certain unease or insecurity when it comes to using the ‘tenses’. Continue reading
A definition of fiction:
A made-up story told in prose with words alone. Words alone. That’s the unique challenge and wonder of written fiction. There’s no actor or storyteller using gesture and inflection. No painter or filmmaker showing settings or close-ups. Everything is done with those little symbols we call letters, which are melded into words, which multiply to form sentences and paragraphs (from: the Gotham Writer’s Workshop, Bloomsbury: New York 2003).
Many people from all kinds of walks of life regularly visit creative writing schools. Their individual motives might differ in detail, but what seems to underlie all is a drive to write stories; not report or document, but to transform thoughts and experiences into written narratives. Why is this, where does this aspiration come from? Continue reading
Update 2023
Besides providing loads of interesting things to explore, I also find the short topical videos under BBC Reel worth looking into, for instance Food for Thought by the nutritionist Kimberly Wilson.
The BBC homepage provides a range of different kinds of information from current news to specific interests; different media (besides texts you find videos and radio broadcasts), a special page for learners of English, quizzes and many more; in short: great sources for your English improvement; Continue reading
One of my group participants has just moved to Australia. His wife was sent there by her company. They work for the same firm, but unfortunately they didn’t have a position for him. (However, I heard from his former colleagues that, once there, he found something.) Due to this major change – as I felt – in his life, I took the opportunity to focus on Australia for as long as he was still there. Australia, so far, had been a country I hadn’t dealt with very often. And as in another class a participant was planning to travel there for five weeks, the topic ‘Australia’ pushed itself into focus.
We dealt with several aspects of the country: e.g. historical themes concerning the original European settlement by the British who needed space for all their prison dwellers. Until then Australia hadn’t been of major interest to the British. Continue reading