Last week I attended an interesting talk on the role of corpora in language teaching and it reminded me a small-scale, corpus-based study I carried out in the late 90s as part of my coursework at Lancaster university. Here are some of the questions I sent out to investigate using the British National Corpus: 1. …
Food idioms are much more common than most people seem to think. Here’s a quick test: 1. It was easy to find your house. With the detailed map you gave me, it was a piece of ___. 2. Talking about racism is a real hot ___ for many Americans. 3. You’re telling me you want to …
Here’s a 10-minute video containing eight song excerpts filled with second conditional examples. If you want to use them, just Google the song title + lyrics and have fun. YouTube will have all the original clips, of course. Have fun! Be warned, though, that some of the songs are pretty cringe-inducing, especially Bonnie Tyler’s 1986 …
I have just come back from a 5-day stay in Buenos Aires, which is hands down one of my favorite cities in the world. Despite their not always undeserved reputation for grumpiness, my Portenho friends have always been gracious with my feeble, embarrassing attempts at Spanish.