Browsing Wikipedia, I came across two special hotels that might demonstrate a difference between two potentially confusing adjectives.

The Rose Rotana, Dubai
72 storeys
333 meters high
The entire building is to be used exclusively as a hotel. It is scheduled to open later this year and will be the tallest hotel in the world.

International Commerce Centre, Hong Kong
118 […]

[Read more →]

I have an article in the current Guardian Weekly which looks at websites that allow learners to work with words (read it here). It mentions the following sites:

Wordle: I’ve written about this site before (see here, here and here)
Wordia: I’ll be posting a full article about this recently-launched video dictionary on teflclips in the next […]

[Read more →]

.

.

.

Preparation
The starting point for this lesson plan was to think of a good number of do or make collocations. My students’ notebooks were helpful for this task. Here is what I found:

Do 100 mph
Do a bungee jump
Make a cup of coffee
Make a face
Make a noise
Make a phone call
Do a strip tease
Make a wish
Do […]

[Read more →]

Got an email from Nick, a friend and attendee of a workshop that I gave a while back. He sent me some of his students’ sketches:

Apparently the language point was ‘put on’ and ‘put off’:

Put on weight
Put on the TV
Put up petrol prices
Put up your hand
Put up posters
Didn’t put on his clothes

Nick tells me that […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

I saw some good examples of noun-noun compounds recently in the London Underground on these advertisements for a fitness club:

According to Wikipedia, “Bingo wings is a slang term used to describe the build-up of fat and/or extra skin that hangs from the underside of the upper arms. It occurs most frequently in elderly ladies and […]

[Read more →]