April was IATEFL month and I really enjoyed taking part in the Pearson Longman panel discussion: Responding to the needs of generation Y. The whole event can be watched below.

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I would like to make this the first of a number of posts on the questions and issues on online video that were raised during the […]

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Homer Simpson once said something along the lines of: “If God had wanted us to be vegetarians, he wouldn’t have made animals out of meat.”

This is the starting point for a lesson plan on the third conditional.
third-conditional.pdf
In the activity, students are given a homework task in which they have to use a search engine […]

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I was happy to hear from Guido, a teacher working in Seville. He said that he liked the idea of using images of book covers from Amazon to create classroom activities. He made this YouTube clip for his students:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hObhPOiT8U

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So what are the missing words?

…..   …………… that I had duck feet
…..   …………… I could hold your […]

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This is the title of a guest posting that I have written for the Macmillan Dictionary blog (link given below). In the posting, I look at the theory behind a YouTube clip that I made a few months ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5XNR419aXE

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You can read the posting here.

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Two cash machines saying the same thing in different ways:

[Top up as a verb]

[Top up as a noun]
This is what language in use is all about - having multiple ways of saying what you want to express.

Can you lend me your pen?
Can I borrow your pen?

Not last night but the night before
The night before […]

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Wordcount is a beautiful squeaky-clean representation of the 86,800 most frequent words in English (data is taken from the British National Corpus).

This is the best representation of a word list I have ever seen. As you can see, the word list is presented as a long horizontal chain. The more common a word in the […]

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