weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
Whenever the subject of hobbies comes up, most of my students promptly say they don’t have any. Obviously, I don't believe that for a second, but I understand why such a response: it isn’t always easy to describe one’s hobby. And if the subject comes up unexpectedly in a speaking exercise, students might not even …
Continue reading "How to talk about hobbies and free time activities"
"If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained." Montague Rhodes James was a British writer and scholar. While his academic work in …
During many years of teaching English, one thing I’ve consistently used with my students have been graded readers (you can see the ones I'm currently using in the cover photo at the top). There are different types of those - some are designed for native speaker children - but the ones I’ll be discussing here …
Continue reading "Graded readers: what are they and how to use them"
A young woman is brutally attacked in her rural Indiana home and almost left for dead. Her memory is patchy, evidence inconclusive, yet in court she insists that it was her extremely jealous husband who did the deed; of that she is absolutely certain. On the basis of her testimony, he gets convicted and ends …
grammaticus 