Engaging and interactive activities to keep students motivated.
Or: why ‘notorious’ never modifies something good There’s a category of vocabulary error that’s genuinely hard to self-correct, because it’s invisible from the inside. You use a word correctly by every dictionary definition, and it still sounds slightly off to a native listener, in a way neither of you can immediately explain. This is semantic […]
Semantic Prosody: The Words That Sound Positive But Aren’t Read More »
Or: why ‘never had I seen’ lands differently from ‘I had never seen’ There’s a small set of grammar structures that native speakers use constantly in formal and semi-formal English, and that most C1+ students recognise but never actually produce. Fronting and inversion are the biggest of these: moving a negative or restrictive element to
Fronting and Inversion: The Grammar That Makes You Sound More Senior Read More »
What neuroscience of musical improvisation gets right about why you freeze mid-sentence There’s a piece of neuroscience research on musical improvisation that maps onto second-language speaking almost too neatly to be a coincidence. Researchers scanning musicians while they improvise have found a consistent pattern: activity drops in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible
Your Brain on a Second Language Is an Improv Brain Read More »
On the World Cup final, and the register nobody teaches Spain play Argentina on Sunday for the World Cup, and for ninety-odd minutes a huge number of C1+ speakers around the world will be listening to English commentary that bears almost no resemblance to anything in a coursebook. Football commentary has developed its own register
Why Football Commentary English Is Its Own Dialect Read More »
On the odd position of medical students trained in English, treating patients in something else entirely There’s a specific kind of two-language problem that shows up in medical schools across Italy, Poland, Hungary, and a handful of other countries: international students recruited into English-taught medicine programmes, trained entirely in English, examined in English, then sent
When the Classroom Language Isn’t the Ward Language Read More »
