When you’re reading a text or listening to something/ someone, do you pay attention to words or phrases? And what about your vocab notebooks, do they contain words or phrases? Not once have I asked my students to highlight some interesting/ useful… Read More »How to notice lexical chunks: collocations
Here I want to share with you a type of activity that makes you repeat things but in quite an entertaining way =) The activity may be called … bubbles/ shapes/ circles, e.g. Preposition bubbles or Perfect circles. The idea is… Read More »Shapes of You – Guessing Games to Practise Grammar or Lexical Chunks
As I’m taking part in #languageadvent2022 (24 gifts for your language till 24th of December) on VK, I come across tons of interesting resources. So far the most precious, I think, has been a series of channels for different languages called Easy…… Read More »How to learn to understand native speech?
Do you use proverbs and sayings a lot in your mother tongue? Which ones are your favourite? And have you noticed what kind of people are really keen on interspersing their speech with proverbs? I know that my mum and grandmas… Read More »Learning proverbs
Several years ago, maybe five or more, I was strictly against using Translators. I had a couple of good reasons for that: 1) they made people lazy, 2) they gave bad translations. At university I was taught to use a… Read More »Should you use Translators in your language learning?
This is to continue on the topic about learning from articles (the algorithm, a discussion task). This is the article in question: From Tamagotchi to Nintendogs: Why People Love Digital Pets The article exemplifies the points I made in my… Read More »Let’s read an article together!
To continue on the topic of improving reading skills by reading articles, I’d like to share some resources I use for myself and my students. And let’s say that by articles I mean longer reads written by professional journalists, and… Read More »And where to find those nice articles to read?..
Did you know that there’s a railway in the Sahara Desert? Or that you can take a ride on a special tourist train there? The Mauritania Railway opened in 1963. It consists of a single, 704-kilometre railway line that links the… Read More »A train in the desert
In one of the previous posts I wrote that it’s an excellent idea to follow work with an article with a discussion of it. But what is a discussion? It may be an exchange of opinions. In the case of the… Read More »An example of a follow-up on a text
Now I’m trying to carve out some time for reanimating my French, and I’m using news articles for this. Articles are great because they are relatively short, can be of a vast variety of topics and the language is not… Read More »Learning From Articles: A Simple Algorithm