Do you know what I hate? Photocopiers. That’s what.
It doesn’t matter if I’m trying to print two-sided copies, enlarge originals, or select the A3 option - my lame efforts will always result in wasted paper and lots of swear words.
You see, I lack a fundamental intelligence that Howard Gardner and his followers have so ruthlessly […]

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Walking, talking dictionaries is the title of an article I wrote for this month’s Onestopenglish. You can read it here. Also, for some strange reason, they wanted to interview me and you can see the result here. In the interview, they asked me what advice I would give to new teachers that would like to […]

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OK this is very silly. I came across one of those websites that exist for people with too much time on their hands and, well, one thing led to another. The site is called the Benny Hillifier and it lets you give any YouTube video the Benny Hill treatment. Anyway, thought my running dictation clip […]

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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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A Hyperlinked Headlines document is a Word file containing a number of thematically-selected newspaper headlines each linked to the news story or article to which it pertains. Here is an example:
climate-change-hyperlinked-headlines.doc
Here is one possible way of using such a file in class:
Day 1

Download the file.
If you have a projector in your classroom, display […]

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A few weeks ago, I posted a lesson plan which made use of a report from the BBC podcast ‘From our own correspondent‘. I love this programme. I love the stories that are reported and I love the language that the correspondents use. The fact that they speak slowly and clearly makes the podcast a […]

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