classroom language: 10 things you might be saying wrong

If you’re a non-native speaker of English and you’ve recently embarked on a teaching career, chances are that you might be making one or two classroom language mistakes you’re not even remotely aware of. After all, as an advanced student, you were probably never corrected in class if you said something like “open your books on page 20″ because, well, you never had to say it in the first place. [Continue reading]

12 words you might be mispronouncing

You will probably find this post useful if:
1. You’re a teacher of English.
2. English is not your native language.
3. You have recently made the transition from advanced student to teacher.
4. You suspect that you might still make a few pronunciation mistakes, which never get corrected. [Continue reading]

70 useful sentences for academic writing

ABC portable typewriter

Back in the late 90s, in the process of reading for my MA dissertation, I put together a collection of hundreds of sentence stems that I felt could help me with my academic writing later on. And they did. Immensely. After the course was over, I … [Continue reading]

subject / verb agreement mistakes: 7 things to bear in mind.

subject verb agreement

First things first: What is subject / verb agreement? It’s a grammatical rule that states that the verb must agree in number with its subject. In English, present tense verbs change to show agreement in the third person singular form by adding … [Continue reading]