Or: the answer that’s correct, exact, and still wrong Show a C1 class a sentence completion gap with the instruction ‘NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS’ and most will treat it as a soft guideline, close enough is close enough. It isn’t. This is graded with the same mechanical strictness as a spelling test: the wrong […]
Sentence Completion: Why ‘No More Than Two Words’ Is Stricter Than It Sounds Read More »
Or: why the heading with the most familiar words is usually the wrong one Give a paragraph about a product’s early sales spike and later collapse to a room of C1 students, and ask for a one-line heading. Most will produce something built straight from the paragraph’s own vocabulary, ‘sales rise and fall.’ A stronger
Matching Headings: Why the Right Answer Never Sounds Like the Paragraph Read More »
Or: the IELTS Reading trap that has nothing to do with your vocabulary Ask a room of C1 students why they lost marks on an IELTS Reading True/False/Not Given section, and most will point to a word they didn’t know. It’s rarely the real cause. This particular question type catches strong readers just as often
True, False, or Not Given: Why the Third Option Beats Strong Readers Read More »
Or: a classroom tangent about dreams, wishes, and one of English’s few genuinely arbitrary rules A recent lesson built around describing dreams and wishes, using the pattern ‘If I could do anything, I would…’, drifted into a genuinely useful tangent: why do we say ‘the Bahamas’ but never ‘the Taiwan’? It is exactly the kind
The Definite Article and Country Names: Why It’s ‘the Bahamas’ but Never ‘the Taiwan’ Read More »
Or: why ‘we do not agree with this price’ is worse than saying nothing Most English teaching pushes hard toward directness and transactional clarity, say what you mean, mean what you say, avoid ambiguity. That’s the right instinct for most contexts. It’s actively wrong in one specific, high-stakes context: negotiation. C1+ speakers trained toward directness
The Pragmatics of Tactical Vagueness: Why C1 Negotiators Fail by Being Too Direct Read More »
Or: a genuine NHS recovery tool, repurposed for a much smaller kind of crisis I use a Wellness Recovery Action Plan, WRAP, a structured self-management tool developed within NHS Recovery College training, and I’ve used it, in one form or another, for years. It was built for genuinely serious situations, but the underlying structure, naming
Your Own WRAP: A Structured Way to Handle Exam and Meeting Nerves Read More »
Or: what AI is actually good for, and where it quietly starts working against you I use AI tools myself, and I recommend them to students, with real caveats. The honest version of this advice isn’t ‘avoid AI’ or ‘let AI do the work’, it’s understanding specifically what it’s good for and where it starts
Or: how to say nothing at all in five hundred words, professionally Somewhere in the last few decades, professional English developed a parasite. It doesn’t help you communicate. It replaces communication with the appearance of communication, at considerably greater length. Here, in the spirit of public service, is a complete guide to producing it. Step
Or: what happens when a boardroom becomes a legal panel Most academic English advice is written for essays and exams. It rarely covers what happens when the audience isn’t a marker but a panel, and the format isn’t a written answer but a live, adversarial defence of your own work. I tutored Master’s candidates at
Or: your grammar mistakes aren’t failures, they’re bug reports Before I taught English, I spent years in IT consultancy, specifying systems, fixing what other people had broken, tracing a fault back to its actual cause rather than the symptom someone happened to notice first. It turns out that instinct transfers almost directly to how I
Debugging Your Syntax: What Systems Diagnostics Can Teach Us About Language Errors Read More »
