‘ never thought I would be able to write 35 pages about writing:=) The more I think about the reasons why people make mistakes when they write in a foreign language, the more convinced I get that it is lexis rather than grammar that does the trick. More than that, it is not about learning lexical items in isolation, you have to learn multi-word chunks, which could either be sequences of...
I wonder whether it is really that necessary to be able to read and describe graphs in a foreign language. I have been teaching this skill for several years now, always going into minute detail, and can say that very few people actually need it in their jobs. They usually spend a few weeks learning all the possible collocations with synonyms of increase and decrease and the degrees of comparison...
I am teaching elementaries this year – this is very unlike me for I find this level somewhat tedious to teach. To make matters worse, instead of two nationalities, I’ve got four – it is a real challenge, for I do understand what sort of problems Russians and Estonians might encounter in terms vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation, but I am at a loss when it comes to...
I guess everyone has got a few pet peeves. Mine are marking creative writing assignments submitted by my students and having to take a smelly tram home (the latter can only be avoided if I choose to walk or take a taxi instead, both of which I quite often do, especially the latter when it’s freezing cold outside). Another thing that drives me up the wall is that I can’t make myself...
