Express Publishing ELT

A recent survey of employers found that when it comes to recruiting young people, they value creativity and adaptability above paper qualifications. The Common European Framework for education outlines competences, rather than the knowledge as the aim of education. It’s not so important what you know, but rather what you can do, so we have a duty to ensure our students practice the sorts of skills they’ll be needing in the future as well as teaching them a language     read more >>

London may not be the best place in the world to live (apparently that’s Vienna), but it is one of the most interesting to visit. Even if you’ve never been and have no intention of going, you can’t escape its influence on world history, culture and language     read more >>

Why do pre-listening tasks?
In real life it is unusual for people to listen to something without having some idea of what they are going to hear. When listening to a radio phone-in show, they will probably know which topic is being discussed. When listening to an interview with a famous person, they probably know something about that person already. A waiter knows the menu from which the diner is choosing their food.     read more >>

A few thoughts on grammar

Is the sentence at the top of the page grammatically correct? Well, it follows the rules about combining words (adjectives + noun + verb + adverb) in the right way, but does it mean anything? Only by a tortuous stretch of the imagination. Something cannot be both colourless and green. It’s hard to imagine sleeping furiously (unless you are violently tossing and turning in the bed). Can an idea sleep? I suppose you could have green ideas if you are thinking of green meaning ecological. The only possible meaningful paraphrase I can think of is something along the lines of: dull ecological ideas don’t result in action, despite all the angry talk. But taken literally, Chomsky’s famous sentence is lacking in the second part of a definition of grammar, which is that the correctly combined words should form acceptable units of meaning within a language. The form must have a function. So, you can be perfectly grammatical but say nothing meaningful.     read more >>