This blog is still only experimental so apologies if it looks a bit sparse.
If you have turned up here by accident whilst meandering through the Web (unlikely), why not consider a couple of things:
How should we teach English:
Many people advocate teaching English purely lexically, rather than through a traditional combination of grammar and vocabulary.
The argument goes something like this: we chiefly get our meaning across through lexis, not grammar. So let's get them to notice the "chunks" of language we use all the time to put our sentences together.
For example, "The design is based on the cathedral in Barcelona."
If we study a concordance (a computer-generated printout of sentences from a database of hundreds of thousands of examples of English) we find that the pattern "is based on the" crops up very frequently where the word "based" is present. Doesn't it, therefore, make sense to teach this pattern (or teach students to notice the pattern)? Then they can trot out a solid chunk of language easily whenever they need it.
But the other side of the coin is, we could just as easily say are, (or was or will be) based on. And it doesn't have to be "the" either:
"My creation will be based on a thousand-year-old recipe."
Oh, but students will easily be able to make the necessary modifications, say advocates of lexical teaching. Will they? Well, yes, if they know some grammar.
So maybe the traditional approach is right after all. Where do you stand?
Or tackle this perplexing question:
Why is 'blog' not recognised by the spell-checker on Blogger.com?!
All contributions gratefully received.
