I just posted a teaching idea on teflclips called Guess the context. The basic activity involves giving students a line from a film clip and asking them to guess who is speaking and what is happening.
I use this technique to demonstrate to students the importance of context. I think that a language learners’ appreciation of […]

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Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the Tate Britain Turner Prize exhibition was the lounge room at the end, half of which was covered in pinboard for visitors to post their comments.

Here are a few that caught my eye:

(That is a piece of chewing gum on the right)

(Someone stole all the pencils)

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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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Before Christmas, I wrote a couple of postings about creating Word Clouds with Wordle.net (see here and here). I mentioned that one of the problems with the site is that although it allows you to print off the Word Cloud images, it doesn’t allow you to save them onto your hard drive.
If you want to […]

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This is, without doubt, the most common question that is asked during a teachers’ workshop that I give titled Do YouTube? I recently made an instructional video for TEFLclips that demonstrates the following:

How to download or ‘capture’ YouTube clips quickly using a website called savevid.com
Why it can be important to rename the video files on […]

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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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