A community portal about English language with blogs, videos, and photos. According to Wikipedia.org: English is the most widely taught and understood language in the world, and sometimes is described as a lingua franca . It is a widely...
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A community portal about English language with blogs, videos, and photos. According to Wikipedia.org: English is the most widely taught and understood language in the world, and sometimes is described as a lingua franca . It is a widely distributed language originating in England that is currently the primary language of several countries. It is extensively used as a second language and as an official language in many other countries. Although Modern Standard Chinese has more mother-tongue speakers English is used by more people as a second or foreign language, putting the total number of English-speakers worldwide at well over one billion.
Standard dictionaries are great for understanding words, but not for comprehending the perplexing kind of phrase known as the idiom. This specialized dictionary provides a generous list of American idioms in an accessible format, but sacrifices phrase origins and portability in the process. The dictionary's comprehensive nature suits students of English as a second language, as well as communications professionals. With over 24,000 entries, it offers over twice the number of listings in the... Read Full Story
It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Here's a list of quality ESL books that I've enjoyed using as a teacher in community colleges, IEP programs, adult education classes, and university courses over the last dozen years. What books have you enjoyed reading and using? Writing Writing Academic English, by Alice Oshima and Ann Hogue, provides practical techniques for students planning to attend community college or university. I think the latest version is the fourth... Read Full Story
A phrase is a group of words without a subject and a conjugated verb; some phrases may have a subject or a conjugated verb, but not both. Each phrase contains a “central” or predominant word or words which are often called the ‘head of the phrase.’
Noun phrases function as subjects, direct object, indirect objects, or objects of prepositions:
My canary is sad.
[ My canary is a noun phrase functioning as the subject of the sentence.]
My yellow canary hits high Cs.
[Noun preceded by... Read Full Story
Parts of Speech Worksheets . You can teach the 8 parts of speech in many different ways, but it is important for the learner to see the different parts of speech used in the context of a sentence to see how they relate to each other. Parts of Speech Worksheets - Click Here The following list will give you a brief overview of the eight parts of speech and their definitions: Verb - Action or state of being Noun - Person, Place, Thing, or Idea Adjective - Describes a noun Adverb - Describes a... Read Full Story
Parts of Speech Worksheets . You can teach the 8 parts of speech in many different ways, but it is important for the learner to see the different parts of speech used in the context of a sentence to see how they relate to each other. Parts of Speech Worksheets - Click Here The following list will give you a brief overview of the eight parts of speech and their definitions: Verb - Action or state of being Noun - Person, Place, Thing, or Idea Adjective - Describes a noun Adverb - Describes a... Read Full Story
In these series of posts, I'm sharing with you the words I try to avoid as much as possible when writing. In the first post on No-No Words , I discussed character names, pronouns and 'to be' verbs. Here are a few other things I watch out for: Weak Verbs: Weak verbs are boring and tend to be overused. Every writer's list will be somewhat different, but we also use a lot of the same weak verbs. Here's my list: walk, move, turn, sat, stood, saw, look, cross, run/ran, go/went/gone, leave/left... Read Full Story
II Timothy 1:7 "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power of love and of sound mind." Nineteen relatively short and simple words and I suspect that if I eat them, they will change my life. Today I began to slice the two words which in Greek are actually one--sound mind. Some translations say self-discipline and others self-control. Actually, this exact Greek word is only used this one time in the entire Bible. Once. So this spirit which God has given us is apparently somewhat... Read Full Story
A Concise Clarification of Phrasal Verbs A phrasal verb is a grouping of a verb and an adverb, a verb and a preposition, or a verb, an adverb, and a preposition. Phrasal verbs perform semantically as units, this means, they possess their own meaning, that is normally a modification of the real meaning of the verb. Nevertheless, the meaning may vary completely. For example: She came across their cousin in the gym. (She met their cousin in the gym.) In this phrase, we blended the verb to come... Read Full Story
By Neal Walters If you are learning Spanish as your first second language, you may find yourself having to review some basic grammatical terms. Almost all foreign language books use terms such as nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs, direct objects and prepositions. So if you aren't familiar with these terms, this article will provide a quick review. A noun is a person, place, or thing such as chair, professor, or dog. Nouns can be singular (one item) or plural (multiple items). DOG is singular... Read Full Story
This simple question has been posed twice in emails this week.
Both ESL students and teachers know that too many textbooks fail to engage readers. Yet rather than focusing on the many sins of the many boring textbooks, let’s focus on those few informative, practical, and interesting ESL books that we like.
Here is a quick, superficial, and by no means comprehensive list of English as a Second Language books that I personally have found successful in teaching English
Academic ESL... Read Full Story
