Vocabulary – the words which make up our language.
This category of articles is all about these words and how we use them and sometimes how they affect the way in which we teach English.
Hangman is a traditional, simple game which is useful as a five minute filler for practicing vocabulary. Variations of the game and played in many different countries so one advantage is that some students will already know the game in their own language (see below). Playing the Game Choose a […]
Please… whatever else you do… spell GRAMMAR with an A at the end and not an E. GRAMM A R – yes GRAMM E R – no According to Google, a search for ‘grammer’ brings up over 4 million hits. Google results for GRAMMER However, things seem to be getting […]
An interesting sideline to the eternal debate about taboo words. The BBC reports that the English term, shitstorm, considered by many to be vulgar and not a word to be used in public as such, has entered the German vocabulary. However, it has entered as a perfectly acceptable term and, […]
Family Tree is an ideal and fun activity for students to practice family relations and working within that semantic field. The basic idea is that you give your students a series of statements about a family such as, “Joe is Mary’s brother” and, “Frank is Julie’s Grandfather” and so on […]
False Friends are pairs of words or phrases in two different languages which look and/or sound similar but which have very different meanings. False Friends are sometimes known as False Cognates. Learners will often assume the corresponding word or phrase in the target language will have the same meaning as […]