One of my students - a restaurant manager - asked me if I could spare 5 minutes at the end of class to check his translation of a Spanish menu.
“Don’t worry too much,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

I’m sure that this is a common scenario for all those who teach English to […]

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In my last posting I gave alist of 10 songs containing either ‘going to’ or gonna or both. In this posting, I am going to show you howI found them.
In the old days, if you had wanted to find 10 songs each containing a piece of target language, you would have had to do one […]

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Song hangman
I heard a song the other day that would seem to confirm a suspicion I have had for a while now. The song, which is called Chapel of love goes something like this:
Go-win’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get married
Go-win’ to the chapel and we’re gonna get married
Gee, I really love you and […]

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Imagine you had a one-to-one with a woman who described herself as technologically challenged. She was given an ipod for Christmas and has been relying on her daughter to download music onto it. She is complaining because her daughter is starting to get bored of her job as a personal IT assistant and without the […]

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This was the title of a presentation I gave at TESOL-Spain in San Sebastian last year and I have just received an email from a teacher (hello Abbie) asking for information on it.
Content and Language Integrated Learning refers to the approach of teaching curricular subjects (history, science, art, etc) and a foreign language at the […]

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Like many online newspapers, the Guardian website has a news in pictures section. Sometimes the images on offer are so good that they write their own lesson plans. The above photograph for example comes from a slideshow titled What they thought of next - a series of pictures from the 36th International Exhibition of Invention […]

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