Express Publishing (ELT)

Friday July 17th 2009 Guardian weekly

Interactive white boards: a valuable tool that can enhance the learning experience or a retrograde step back to classrooms where students are just passive consumers of information. Pete Sharma explores both sides in an increasingly heated debate about the role of technology.

Step up … multimedia tools can engage learners but also dominate lessons     read more >>

This text and exercise can be used with higher level classes as a fun activity. After the matching task, they could try and make up their own silly author names and books or share any amusing names in their own language.

What do you call some of the most unlucky people in Britain?

Justin Case, Barb Dwyer and Stan Still. It sounds like a bad joke, but a study of online telephone records has revealed that there really are unfortunate people with those names in the UK. Joining them on the list are Terry Bull, Mary Christmas, and Anna Sasin. And just imagine having to introduce yourself to a crowd as Doug Hole, Tim Burr or Dawn Hobbs. Researchers also scoured phone records in the US and found some unlikely names there too. Spare a thought for Anna Prentice, Annette Curtain and Bill Board the next time you sign your name.     read more >>

Here’s Bill Bryson on the word set. “Superficially it looks like a wholly unassuming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb and 10 as a participle adjective. Its meanings are so varied and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words – the length of a short novel – to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.”

So set is a polyseme. – a word with many meanings. Now here’s a contronym: the word cleave. This can be to cut in half or stick together. Sanction means permission or forbiddance. If you wind up a watch, you start it, but if you wind up a meeting, you end it. This can be confusing.     read more >>