You can read my latest posts below or use the tools on the right hand side of the page to search for posts that interest you.
Chat with other learners at English Club
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.
read moreLearn and laugh with the news
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.
read moreNatural English explained at UsingEnglish.com
Using English is particularly useful for its phrasal verb dictionary, idioms dictionary and ask a teacher forum. They have quizzes about phrasal verbs and if you have any questions they have special forums for phrasal verbs and idioms. If you’ve heard an expression in a film or read something in a book that you just can’t understand, ask the helpful people at Using English. I post there sometimes, too!
read moreLearning with the BBC
The BBC is possibly one of the richest sources of high-quality, free English learning material on the Internet. Their Learning English site has so many sections I really can’t talk about all of them here (although I will say Words in the News is a very good place to start). Skillswise has excellent sections on spelling, reading, and writing. Their Video Nation site has interviews with real people and a short quiz afterwards to see if you heard the information correctly. A good way to hear lots of different accents (and see where they are...
read moreAdvanced writing techniques for American university students
The Guide to Grammar and Writing is a resource for American college students so the language on the site is considerably more advanced than on a site for English learners. However, the information is extensive and you may find the pages on punctuation (under Word and Sentence Level) and sentence combining skills (under Paragraph Level) particularly useful.
read moreBasic writing tips
English Grammar Online 4U is an excellent writing resource that provides a lot of very useful tips without getting too complicated. Their General Information on Writing English Texts is a very good place to start improving your writing.
read morePracticing phrasal verbs
It may not always be necessary to use phrasal verbs, but they are a big part of using English naturally and fluently. So how do you practice them? First we need to figure out what exactly is difficult to remember about them and then find a way to isolate that and drill it in a way that we can remember. Read my blog post about remembering phrasal verbs if you haven’t already. Once you have examples that you want to practice, Anki is the perfect tool for the job. Anki flashcards Anki is a free, open-source software project which is...
read moreRemembering phrasal verbs
Once you have looked up the meaning of a phrasal verb, you will usually remember it when you see it again. For example, to put up with something means to tolerate it. You might read this and look it up in the dictionary and the next time you see it, you’ll remember what it means from the context. But the difficult part is remembering all of the parts when you want to use it. The best thing to do is to take an example sentence from Using English or a dictionary and write it in your notebook with the particles removed (put the particles on a...
read moreUnderstanding phrasal verbs
One of the best resources for this (besides a good monolingual dictionary) is Using English.com. Using English has an excellent phrasal verb dictionary (also an idioms dictionary) as well as a forum where you can ask for extra information or just check that you are using them correctly. Try and notice patterns with certain particles (the prepositions or adverbs that make up the phrasal verb) and how they change the meaning of the base verb on its own. For example, in the verbs to give something back, take it back, or pay it back, “back”...
read moreFind words in their natural habitat: corpora and context
Sometimes it’s difficult to really understand the exact sense of a word without seeing it in context. For example, the words chance, opportunity and possibility. They all have quite similar meanings but they all have particular situations in which they can be used. If you visit the British National Corpus and type the words into the search box separately, the corpus will show you 50 examples of that particular word or phrase from a range of written and spoken material in Britain. So now can you see the difference between possibility and...
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