weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
Enid Blyton’s book series The Famous Five turns eighty this year! Still much loved by children all over the world and translated into numerous languages, the series describes the holiday adventures of brothers Julian and Dick, their sister Anne, cousin George (Georgina, that is), and George’s pet dog Timmy. Those of a certain age have …
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] Are you bored or boring? Was the last film you saw interested or interesting? There are many adjectives in English that can be used with the endings -ed and -ing, and students sometimes confuse them. If you are unsure when …
Continue reading "Grammar practice: adjectives in -ed and -ing"
In an earlier post about interpreting poetry, I tried to convince my readers of the merits of reading poems and enjoying them as a form of art. There I also presented a six-step approach to interpreting poems that I will be referring to throughout this article, so you might want to have a look at …
Continue reading "Discussing Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Tables Turned’"
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] There are countless resources on the internet that can help you with learning and practising new vocabulary. In this post, I’ll introduce you to just three websites I always recommend to my students and that I regularly use myself. Make …
Continue reading "Top 3 online resources for your vocabulary study"
Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories and novels featuring Sherlock Holmes contain a lot of little details about Victorian society, its culture, available technology and social conventions. As I was re-reading all the canonical stories earlier this year for the umpteenth time, my attention was inadvertently drawn to food, of all things. I found it interesting to …
Continue reading "Eat like Sherlock: food in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories"
There are many different kinds of beans, from kidney beans and string beans to pinto and lima beans. Apart from being the key ingredient in many popular dishes all over the world, did you know that beans also happen to be an ingredient in a number of phrases and idioms in English? Let’s learn a …
Continue reading "Do you know how many beans make five? – Expressions with the word ‘bean’"
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B2 and above.] Do you like reading books? What kind of books do you like best? Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction? In this post we’ll go over the vocabulary that you can use to discuss books, from the words for different genres …
The first heatwave of the summer is here. Daytime temperatures reach 35°C / 95°F, and I’m barely able to cope with it. Hot weather is most definitely not my thing and I can’t wait for the cool, crispy days of autumn! However, as much as I dislike the heat, I do like talking about the …
Continue reading "Words and phrases to describe hot weather"
I haven’t blogged much about the history of the English language, but the arrival of summer is just begging for a quick introduction to something called Middle English. It's a form of English spoken in the Middle Ages, between the 11th and the 16th century. During that period, Old English underwent massive changes that eventually …
If you like dark and gloomy crime TV with a touch of supernatural and mythological, don’t miss the French series Black Spot on Netflix. When I first started watching Black Spot (orig. Zone blanche), I assumed it would be a typical crime story set in a small place in the middle of nowhere (just the …
Continue reading "Searching for Cernunnos in Villefranche: a review of ‘Black Spot’"
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