English, Jack

This is the third post on Ron Cowan's new and rather poorly considered The Teacher's Grammar of English. I wrote to Ron a week ago a...

Yesterday, I promised that I would write a number of posts explaining why Ron Cowan's new The Teacher's Grammar of English ( TGE )...

Cambridge ESL embarrasses itself once again with the recent publication of Ron Cowan's The Teacher's Grammar of English . I've a...

When Oxford released the 7th edition of its Advanced Learner's Dictionary , it included a list of 3,000 key words. "The keywords o...

Language learners are constantly faced with the task of dealing with unfamiliar vocabulary. Unfortunately, their teachers too often expect t...

The trampoline in our backyard is quite a magnet for the local kids. Over the last few nice weekends we've had up to nine of them here a...

One of the characteristics of English nouns (common, proper, and pro-) is that they can almost all appear in genitive (possessive) case. But...

Geoff Pullum has posted a new bit on Language Log describing another negative review by Rodney Huddleston of some pedagogical grammar arti...

Last week I attended a meeting of representatives from a number of Ontario Colleges who are undertaking to benchmark the language requiremen...

Earlier this year I had a particularly thoughtful and engaged student from South Korea. She happened to be here looking after her son, an in...

On Friday, the 4,000th entry was added to the simple English Wiktionary . In fact, the count is somewhat arbitrary as it includes some relat...

About a year and a half ago, Geoff Pullum noticed a situation in which it appeared that the adjective was obligatory and the article option...

According to Kang Shin-who reporting in the The Korea Times , " Koreans spend a lot of energy and money on studying English but their...

Again, Lesley Taylor of The Toronto Star reporting : The government of Canada has backed off its plan to have all immigrants take the IELTS...

This morning, the Toronto Star's Lesley Ciarula Taylor reports on the government's plan for the IELTS test to become the single an...

Up until now, there have only been two thesauri (or thesauruses if you prefer) for learners of English: The Longman Language Activator and...

English Teachers in Japan is a mostly eponymous group (I say mostly because there are some members like me who aren't in Japan) that run...

Trading places with your students is good experience for any language teacher. A good long trade really is the best: the kind where you go a...

For some time there was a fair bit of debate over at en.wiktionary about whether to list words such as all, most, every, this, etc. as adje...