he articles here cover a whole bunch of English Usage issues.
We answer all those kinds of awkward questions your TEFL students ask : why do we say this instead of that?
Which means that each article also includes advice for the TEFL teacher: what you should teach and what just isn’t worth mentioning to your class.
Finally, if you’ve a question about how we use the English language, feel free to contact ICAL TEFL and we’ll answer it here!
Grammar books can generally be divided into two different types: Descriptive or Prescriptive. This article looks at the difference between them. Very simply, a descriptive grammar looks at what people actually say in real life and then lays out a series of statements describing what is said. With modern technology […]
The Wall Street Journal published a blog post in which it decided to class data as a singular noun which, according to the rules of subject-verb agreement goes with a singular verb, much like information. For the WSJ this is good English: the data is collected However, many traditionalists contend […]
This is the vocabulary which often causes problems with learners: words which look pretty much the same and which most logical people would regard as closely related, but then when you look into it a little more, they’re all over the place! Let’s start with Country and a couple of […]
A professor of comparative English at Columbia university said that commas should be abolished. He said we should get rid of them and no one would care. He says we should kill them. Destroy them. Take each one and murder it in cold blood. And the reaction? Pages of internet […]
Earlier in the year we reported on how Cambridge city council in the UK had decided not to use apostrophes in street signs and how examiners for Cambridge Assessment (the ones who do all the TEFL exams) had supported this idea. It was, of course, ridiculous of them to do […]
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