It’s Hot Potatoes charity month
The following is a message from Martin Holmes, the creator of Hot Potatoes, which is probably the best tool for creating online teaching exercises and one I’ve been using for years:
May is Charity Month for Half-Baked Software, which means that for the whole of this month, we’re donating all the money we receive for Hot [...]
Bilingual babies get a head start before they can even talk
Here’s an interesting finding from the National Geographic:
Even before they can babble a single word, babies in bilingual households may get a head start in life, according to a team of scientists in Italy. Rather than confusing babies, hearing more than one language gives newborns a mental boost, according to the new study, which tested [...]
I can’t compete with this
Happy new year to all of you, wherever you find yourself mired in the life of the professional TEFLer. Now, I’ve never resorted to getting my kit off in order to teach a particular language point and I’m sure my students are very grateful for that. Nevertheless, this particular ‘methodology’ may have something going for [...]
Americans set to learn English
English can be a tough language to learn, just ask the misunderestimated outgoing president of the United States, but the federal government hopes to make it easier with a free website intended to improve access to language instruction for immigrants, as well as ex-presidents.
The website, the innovatievely titled usalearns.org, is a free and easily accessible [...]
It’s partly Greek to me
Celia Webb has followed up her article ‘Improving Vocabulary through Latin Prefixes‘ over at the ELT Times with ‘It was Greek to Me: Improving Your English by Knowing Greek Roots‘.
‘Greek provides many important prefixes, suffixes, and roots used in the English language‘ regales Celia in her article at the World’s first online TEFL Newspaper. ‘To [...]
Improving Vocabulary through Latin Prefixes
‘English contains many words adopted from other languages‘, notes Celia Webb, somewhat emphatically, over at the ELT Times: the World’s first online TEFL Newspaper. ‘In fact‘, she proclaims, ‘experts estimate 80% of English words originated elsewhere. The biggest influence on English vocabulary is Latin. An examination of the 20,000 most used words reveals 5,000 words [...]
Sesame Street Targets English Language Learners
In news that fills my heart with joy, I was delighted to learn of the emergence of Sesame Street English, a new 26×2-minute series from Sesame Workshop featuring anime-style versions of the show’s signature Muppets introducing preschoolers to the English language. Sesame Street English, which can be adapted for classrooms, uses research-based methods to provide [...]