Tag Archives: idioms

6 Online Dictionaries for English Learners

Elena Shvidko
Elena Shvidko

Dictionaries are an extremely useful source of information about a language, and they can certainly be very helpful to our students as well. Luckily, nowadays, various dictionaries are freely available on the internet, and I believe many of you are … Continue reading

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Adapting Folktales for ELL Learning Activities

Nathan Hall
Nathan Hall

We content-based teachers often struggle with how to make students focus on the specific reading skills we want them to learn without being distracted or overwhelmed by the language. This gets more difficult when my activity focuses on fiction, especially … Continue reading

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It’s a Piece of Cake: Easy Ways to Teach Tricky Idioms

Nathan Hall
Nathan Hall

If I described your writing assignment as “horse horse tiger tiger,” what am I saying about it? Would you “try to cut the pear in two” to figure out what my feedback meant? Or would you assume I “don’t have … Continue reading

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6 Websites for Learning English Idioms

Elena Shvidko
Elena Shvidko

When you ask university-level English language learners how they would like to improve their English, many of them say they want to use more idiomatic expressions. Unfortunately, teachers seem to rarely have time to explicitly teach idioms in class. Luckily, … Continue reading

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Teaching Idioms to Young English Learners

Judie Haynes
Judie Haynes

Well-chosen children’s literature can provide an excellent opportunity to explicitly teach the concept of idiomatic language to young English learners.  Thematic units on friendship or feelings are an especially good way to introduce idioms and tie them to the lesson … Continue reading

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Figuring out the frequency of two word verbs

Joe McVeigh
Joe McVeigh

The December 2011 TESOL Quarterly contains a wonderful study by Dilin Liu analyzing the frequency of phrasal verbs across several corpora. This is a really useful article for teachers and materials writers, with lots of great information in it and … Continue reading

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