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Entries from December 2008

A Christmas confession

December 29th, 2008 · 6 Comments

Just spent a few days at my parent’s home in Scotland. I found this buried in a drawer - an old photocopy of a Christmas card that I made when I was about eight years old.

This was my entry for the annual school Christmas card design - a very prestigious competition I seem to remember.
The […]

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Tags: Uncategorized

Credit Crunch Christmas

December 18th, 2008 · 4 Comments

“We are currently witnessing the worst credit crunch the world has ever seen since the term was invented last year.”
I heard someone saying that on the radio a couple of weeks ago and it made me laugh. It also made we wonder when the term really did come into existence.
I can’t find anything online about […]

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Tags: 'Credit Crunch' · Learner-friendly corpora · Using online newspapers · Vocabulary

Wordle for short texts (lesson plan)

December 11th, 2008 · 6 Comments

Below, you will find 10 sentences about the blue whale. Unfortunately, the words are mixed up. Can you put them in the correct order? (You will probably need a pen and a piece of paper for this).
Number one:

Number two:

Number three:

Number four (in this case, the word ‘as‘ must be used twice):

Number five:

Number six:

Number seven:

Number eight […]

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Tags: Adjectives · Comparison · Grammar · Lesson plans · Wordle

Word Clouds

December 8th, 2008 · 2 Comments

Wordle.net is an online tool which is used to create Word Clouds. Here is an example of a word cloud:

This Word Cloud was made using the ‘monkey keeps stealing my peanuts‘ joke. Note that the more a word appears in the text, the bigger it will be in the cloud. In the joke, for example, […]

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Tags: Lesson plans · Songs · Wordle · Writing

Another parser breakdown

December 3rd, 2008 · 2 Comments

English grammar books tell us that in cases when a defining relative clause is the subject, the relative pronoun can be omitted. This potentially confusing point is best demonstrated by the following song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY8nRfEnWtc

“You’re the one that I want” (relative pronoun present)
“You are the one I want” (relative pronoun absent)
Last week, I wrote a posting about […]

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Tags: Grammar