Group items tagged

The shortage of trained English language teachers is one of the reasons for the students' poor grasp of the language, National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP) president Hashim Adnan said yesterday. "Most of the teachers have a poor command of the language. How do you expect students to learn English when the teachers themselves do not know the basics of the language?

"Get students thinking of why english is important and how they will learn it. Think up a few categories of things. Transportation, food, tools, clothing, rooms in house and feelings usually are good ones. Next ask each student to get out a sheet of paper and a pencil. As you name each category students must think of the thing in that category that makes him think of english class and why. For example in the category feelings: Scary because he might have to talk in another language.In the category room a student could choose the kitchen because there is a lot of interaction going on. The teacher then invites students to say their answer out loud and reason why he chose it. This helps the teacher to get to know his students and discuss their apprehensions, ideas and goals about the class. Students also get to know each other and find out that maybe they are not the only ones with those feelings. Teacher can follow up by explaining how class will proceed, what they'll do and what he expects from them."

"Largest archive of 1000s of idioms, phrases, sayings, expressions and their meanings. FREE!!! Learn and practice a lot of great phrases for your upcoming conversations, from this app. An idiom is a phrase where the words, when used together, have a meaning that is different from the idiom dictionary definitions of the individual words. The group of words in an idiomatic expression do not mean what they appear to mean. This at times can make idioms hard for students and learners to understand. This app lists the English idioms and Phrases, idiomatic expressions, proverbs and sayings, in alphabetical order by theme, with their meaning and an example. It has clear and crisp explanations and illustrations, perfectly suitable for homework as well as general spoken English learning & usage."

I've culled this list from the General Service List - a frequency list for English.  These are words that are frequent in English and are relatively easy to picture.  Most of them will show up in the top 2000 words of your target language, and so you can save a bit of time by adding these words to your Anki deck right at the beginning.

Today, my body was a TV'd massacre. Today, my body was a TV'd massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits. Today, my body was a TV'd massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits filled enough with statistics to counter measured response. And I perfected my English and I learned my UN resolutions. But still, he asked me, Ms. Ziadah, don't you think that everything would be resolved if you would just stop teaching so much hatred to your children? Pause. I look inside of me for strength to be patient but patience is not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza. Patience has just escaped me. Pause. Smile. We teach life, sir. Rafeef, remember to smile. Pause. We teach life, sir. We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky. We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies. We teach life, sir. But today, my body was a TV'd massacre made to fit into sound-bites and word limits. And just give us a story, a human story. You see, this is not political. We just want to tell people about you and your people so give us a human story. Don't mention that word "apartheid" and "occupation". This is not political. You have to help me as a journalist to help you tell your story which is not a political story. Today, my body was a TV'd massacre. How about you give us a story of a woman in Gaza who needs medication? How about you? Do you have enough bone-broken limbs to cover the sun? Hand me over your dead and give me the list of their names in one thousand two hundred word limits. Today, my body was a TV'd massacre that had to fit into sound-bites and word limits and move those that are desensitized to terrorist blood. But they felt sorry. They felt sorry for the cattle over Gaza. So, I give them UN resolutions and statistics and we condemn and we deplore and we reject. And these are not two equal sides: occupier and occupied. And a hundred dead, two hundred dead, and a thousand de

The English language has many idiomatic expressions. Idiomatic expressions or phrases are difficult because their meanings are not literally, but metaphorical. For example the expression, "Time on my hands"  does not mean that there is a clock on my hands, or that I am holding a clock or watch,  but that  there is additional time to do other things. For example, in the sentence " I have a lot of time on my hands now that classes are finished"  means now that I no longer have to study for classes, I am free to do other things with my time. The following idioms are common in American English. They are listed in alphabetical order for your convenience.   When you think you're ready, go test your knowledge in the Game room.

The etymology of a word refers to its origin and historical development: that is, its earliest known use, its transmission from one language to another, and its changes in form and meaning. Etymology is also the term for the branch of linguistics that studies word histories.

The world's largest ranking of English skills

While many people think of poetry as something that is difficult and would be hard for non-native speakers, Alan provided some excellent exercises to show how even low-level learners of English can easily get into L2 creativity through simple poetry exercises. In this way, they can express emotions and incidents from their own lives in simple English which helps them to gain a better understanding of the communication resources at their disposal as well as providing strong motivation for further study. Below, I have described his exercises with my own simple poetry examples.

Teaching English one on one offers numerous benefits to both teacher and student. Teachers have the chance to customize each lesson to his or her student's needs, and the possibility to target activities to a student's strengths and weaknesses is a huge plus. But the greatest benefits are for the ESL student. The student has the unique opportunity for intensive practice. If the student speaks for most of the lesson, he or she will make progress faster. And the same goes for other skills. Still, the teacher is the one responsible for maximizing their time with the student. Here are some practical tips for effective one on one lessons.

This section features original English grammar and usage worksheets for teachers and parent-teachers to copy for their kids. Use them for teaching, reinforcement, and review. Many of these free worksheets can be used as the basis for lesson plans.

The first Malay-English online dictionary! Search alphabetically or using a word search.

ED is an offline Japanese Dictionary. FAQ: - The new design, the new icon, the fix for the tags bug, the improved search results, the edict data update, the fix for FC on ICS, the removal of permissions and the hand writing recognition based kanji search mentioned in the posts were all due for the next release, but the development is currently on hold. - The server that hosts the dictionaries also hosts projects of higher priority, so I might take off them from time to time. Please retry and be patient. - Some users reported the their data got corrupted, please try to delete the jed folder on your sd card and reinstall the app from scratch. - This application works offline once the dictionary files are downloaded, BUT does send analytics data (Google Analytics) if wifi is available! - User data ( especially tags!!! ) gets deleted when updated! - Only use the current version; data files of older versions gets deleted! - Feel free to contact me or comment if something does no work, but please provide as much information as you can (device, version number, etc). Current features: - Works offline - Search and view results as you type! - Multiple dictionaries ( English-Japanese, French-Japanese, Spanish-Japanese ) - Search in readings (romaji), meanings (english) and japanese (kanji, hiragana and katakana) - Search results can contain words, expressions, kanji (both onyomi and kunyomi) and inflected form for adjectives and verbs. - Filters results based on content type (meaning, reading, character type, parts of speech, common words, common kanji) - Radicals lookup - tags (vocabulary list) with possibility to search and export to Google Docs and Anki. - Animated Stroke Order Diagrams for kanji - Copy-Paste for most of the field and a notepad to gather information - Move to SD card (above 2.2) Acknowledgements: - Electronic Dictionaries Research Groups - KanjiVG - Tatoeba - KanjiCafe

by Michael J. Crawford of Dept of English, Hokkaido University of Education, Japan Published in Journal of Hokkaido University of Education Humanisities and Social Sciences: Vol. 52, No. 1)

An alphabetical list of Greek and Latin roots, stems, suffixes, and prefixes commonly used in English.