jamiekeddie.com header image 4

Entries from April 2009

Tall versus high

April 21st, 2009 · 13 Comments

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 →]

Tags: Grammar · Superlatives · Tall/high · Vocabulary

Baby gorilla drawings

April 18th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Burcu Akyol sent me some drawings from one of her classes. She asked her students to draw a man with a baby gorilla talking to a policeman in the street. Students were then asked to consider what was happening and create dialogs. This is a preparation stage for an activity from my new book (that’s […]

[Read more →]

Tags: Lesson plans · Stories · Student drawings

A true story

April 16th, 2009 · 4 Comments

I have a very friendly postman in Barcelona (actually I should say “I had a very friendly postman” since I have recently moved away from the city). Anyway, for 4 years, he delivered bills, bank statements, junk mail and every now and again, a letter or two. Although we were never on first-name terms, our […]

[Read more →]

Tags: Stories

IATEFL Images talk

April 12th, 2009 · 3 Comments

Thanks to everyone who came along to the Oxford University Press event in Cardiff last week where I was presenting a few ideas from my new book: Images. I shared the session with two other writers from the series - Hans Mols and Ken Wilson.

Me (’Creative ideas using images’)

Hans Mols (’Creative ideas for teaching grammar […]

[Read more →]

Tags: Conferences and workshops

Past participle homophones

April 7th, 2009 · 1 Comment

A headline from the Guardian reads: Rubber banned: Keep Britain Tidy wages war on Royal Mail elastic bands (read article here).

The exploitation of homophones for play-on-word newspaper headlines is common practice. In this case, one of the words is a regular -ed past participle (banned) and that makes it extra clever. Here are other examples […]

[Read more →]

Tags: Grammar · Newspapers · Past participle

Working with words (article)

April 1st, 2009 · 2 Comments

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 →]

Tags: Newspapers · Vocabulary · Wordle