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The end of last week was quite empty in the CELE corridor, since over half the team had gone to the MELTA conference in Kuching. This is a large academic conference, focused on the wider world of English language teaching in Malaysia and beyond, this year featuring Asia TEFL- thus making it two conferences in …

What is the plural of ‘computer mouse’?

  It’s an old question- what is the plural of “computer mouse”- is it “mouses” or “mice”? My 1996 Collins dictionary says it’s “mice”, while my 2010 Oxford Learner’s dictionary says either. A number of websites suggest avoiding the issue altogether, and calling them “pointing devices”.   There is a theory that mouse is an …

Whose time are we talking about?

What is time? Or more precisely, what is your perception of time? Does time pass in a line? Or in cycles? Can you know the future? Can you know the past? It seems like a simple question, but in fact the perception of time is part of a deep cultural imprint which we may rarely …

Is “adorkable” a word?

There is a recent TED video, in which Anne Curzan, a Professor of English from Michigan University discusses how words move from being neologisms to established words. It’s witty, informed and well worth a watch. One of the most interesting points she makes is that people often say that it is a legitimate word if …

Once it’s gone, you can’t get it back.

How many languages are spoken in the world? It’s quite a hard question to answer, because of definitional issues a between language and a dialect, but the answer is probably around 6,000 – 7,000. One thing is very certain, however. As shown in a piece in the Guardian, this number is dropping. Language death is …

EAP in the MOOC age?

It sometimes seems that you can’t move without tripping over a MOOC, or another form of online learning. Rightly or wrongly, online learning is taking more and more space in the HE curriculum. An EAP (English for Academic Purposes) syllabus will typically have features that reflect a traditional university experience- reading, listening, writing essays and …

Gender-Neutral Teaching

In my previous post, I invited students to consider if social pressure to conform to idealised forms of masculinity and femininity could be affecting their classroom behaviour. Yesterday, at a workshop on Gender-Neutral Teaching, I turned the spotlight to ourselves as teachers, with particular regards to the attention given to male and female students as …

Snake Oil and Language Learning

Neuro-Linguistic programming. Visual/ Audio/Kinaesthetic. These are concepts that will be familiar with anyone in the world of English language teaching. They are sometimes championed by some of the big names in the field- and are often touted as the panacea for language learning. Increasingly, they also seem to be entering more mainstream higher education. However, …

What’s in a word?

Dave Willis, a pioneer of Task Based Learning in Language teaching, wrote “Fluent language use depends not simply on knowing a lot of words, but also on knowing a lot about a lot of words” (as quoted recently by  @scottthornbury) What did he mean? Well let’s take the word “analyse” What do you need to …

Does language influence thought?

There is a TED video where a second generation Vietnamese immigrant suggests that his view of life is different to his parents because Vietnamese doesn’t have a subjunctive, and English does. This allows him the luxury of speculating and imagining, as well as adding layers of subtlety to his language, whereas his parents speak directly …