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 an S (or ES). Seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it? So how could it be that [...]
subject / verb agreement mistakes: 7 things to bear in mind.
Posted on March 14, 2013 Written by 11 Comments
noticing and language learning
Posted on February 3, 2012 Written by 6 Comments
Of all the ELT buzzwords I’ve heard, thought about and used over the past decade, noticing has got to be by far the most frequent. Fortunately, noticing is nowhere near as broad and ambivalent as communicative, for example, which makes it much easier to pin down conceptually. So, what is noticing, anyway, and how does [...]
linguistic intuition
Posted on December 22, 2010 Written by 2 Comments
There’s a very interesting discussion taking place on Scott Thornbury’s blog right now, sparked by his brilliant “feel” post. The central question he attempts to address is one which has been incessantly nagging at me for at least fifteen years: What’s the role of linguistic intuition in language learning?
ESL textbooks – the orthodoxy
Posted on December 7, 2010 Written by 5 Comments
What do modern EFL/ESL textbooks look like? Over the past five months, for a number of different reasons, I’ve been analyzing dozens of EFL / ESL textbooks (I’m using the terms interchangeably) put out by the mainstream publishing houses. For better and for worse, all these EFL / ESL textbooks have more similarities than differences, [...]
