There really is nothing quite so tedious and boring as a prescriptive grammarian.  And I’m a native speaker, and an English teacher with a section about grammar on his blog!  I really have a lot of sympathy for people who are learning English.  Let me explain what I mean by “prescriptive grammar.” To paraphrase the linguist David Brazil, a grammarian must begin from one of the following assumptions: We can discover the rules...

Email Writer is a new app for iPhone, iPad and Android which will allow you to select from thousands of sentence combinations so you can write your business emails quickly and easily.  Sometimes you don’t want to look for the right preposition or expression when you’re in a hurry and this app will be a huge help in those situations.  Watch the video to see how it works! The maker of the app also runs The Business English Blog with...

You’ve checked your dictionary and your grammar books and you still don’t know the best way to say something.  Or maybe you know the “right” way to say something, but you want to know why it’s the “right” way.  You might have problems with an idiom, slang or phrasal verbs; or you just want someone to check some sentences you’ve written. Here are two great forums where English teachers and native...

We all use a spell-checker when we write, but most of them don’t notice when we write the wrong word.  If I wrote, “I had a bear at the pub last night,” all of the words are spelled correctly but I should have typed “beer.”  Ginger is a new kind of spelling and grammar checker that checks the context of your words, not just the words in isolation.  Ginger notices “pub” in the sentence and offers to...

English Club has lots of information, quizzes and guides to help you understand and practice English better.  Their forums are a great place to chat with other learners about things that interest you.

The English Blog is a great place to browse lots of news stories and videos with notes from an English teacher.  He updates the site daily with relevant stories and interesting cartoons and videos that show real English in context.  There really is a huge amount of material here (search the categories) as well as a lot of links to webistes for English Language Learners (ELL) and podcasts.