In August, 2006, YouTube announced its plan to offer ‘every music video ever created’. For a while, it seemed as if this would be an achievable goal as one by one, Google (the owners of YouTube) reached agreements with the big music groups. But one of these agreements ended as a dispute just before Christmas […]

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What sort of people try to trick their loyal customers with double negative questions? After spending 30 minutes on the National Express website, attempting to buy a coach ticket from London to Leeds, they tell me:
We regularly send out details of our special offers and promotions
Now it goes without saying that I don’t want to […]

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Here’s my favourite YouTube clip of the moment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_B5UrI7nAI

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This is a bit like an audio version of the famous Rubin’s vase. In this optical illusion, you can see either the vase or the two profiled faces but you can’t see them both at once.

Similarly, in the “Obama’s elf” auditory illusion (if that’s what you can call […]

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Sometimes students tell me that they would like to do a revision lesson. I ask them what they would like to revise and they say, “Verbs, of course”. Then I say, “What aspect of verbs would you like to revise?” and they reply, “Oh, you know - the past, the present, the future, and things […]

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I’ve just posted a lesson plan on teflclips called Can you say that grammatically?. The aim of the activity is to introduce students to variation in English.
Part of the activity involves getting students to identify the non-standard grammar in a series of sentences such as:

I’ll give it you tomorrow
What would you do if it would […]

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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 […]

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