Articles in the ‘Language Matters’ Section
In the times of the Ancient Greece and Rome, the purpose of memory techniques was to compensate for the scarcity of recording media, or even their complete absence - in which case memory techniques were supplemented with repetition techniques for permanent memorizing. That seems to be an ingredient we are missing today. The question is ...
Introduction This article sets out to explore the merits of pre-teaching items of lexis in receptive skills lessons, a standard procedure for many teachers when working on receptive skills in class. It is a technique that most trainees will learn on pre-service teacher training courses such as CELTA and one which will thus naturally form part ...
There are multiple different contexts for teaching and learning English but the one common feature to be found in almost any curriculum is the course book. Many have been the prophets foretelling the end of course books, but their words have fallen on deaf ears if judged by objective sales figures: of the billion-pound industry ...
At the DOS Conference in Greenwich in January this year Jim Scrivener and Adrian Underhill led three sessions on their meme of ‘Demand High’. The first introductory session, led by Jim, was met by quite a few heads nodding in agreement; in the second – a feedback session – there was a mixture of responses ...
A student comes from hundreds of kilometres away, on his holiday, just for his bi-weekly 90-minute English session. Another one finally breaks the surprisingly longstanding, not to mention downright bad, habit of relying solely on classroom input and starts doing plenty of extra work, thus making much more visible progress. Yet another continues to attend ...
Michael Halliday: An appreciation By Alan Jones Hallidayan linguistics today With the publication of his Collected Works over the past several years by Continuum, Michael Halliday has entered the pantheon of modern linguistics. His name appears in all good overviews of linguistics, language philosophy and applied linguistics (see, for example, Linguistic Theory: The Discourse of Fundamental Works, 1991, by Robert ...
Teaching Language: from Grammar to Grammaring by Diane Larsen-Freeman by Wayne Rimmer As the traditional cornerstone of the curriculum, there have been no shortage of theories of grammar and its place in language acquisition. Grammar teaching has largely followed its treatment in successive schools of linguistics. For example, the passion for comparative philology in the nineteenth century ...
Anticipating the effect of the rise of China on EIL By Jacqueline McEwan Which would you choose from this range of sauces on display in a Shanghai restaurant? peru system red pepper sauce the peppery shrimp slips lives pulls out the soy sauce at the end of coriander explodes the garlic deer velvet …and do you have a favourite from my Top 10 ...
by Mark Lowe 1. Happy Birthday Michael Halliday, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, is one of the great linguists of our time. Like his equally illustrious fellow-linguist, Chomsky, he has now turned 80. Everyone concerned with language will wish to celebrate. Continuum Publishers are celebrating by bringing out a new 10-volume edition of ...
Through winter, rides between Oslo and Hammerfest use thirty hours up in a bus, though why travellers would select to ride there then might be pondered. It was Noam Chomsky who observed that even though almost all the language children hear being spoken around them is presumably grammatically ‘correct’ they still manage to develop a near-perfect ...