A native speaker of English is a person who has grown up speaking English as their first language or mother tongue. In terms of English teachers this usually means from one of the major English speaking countries: the USA, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa. […]
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n-grams and TEFL
In the fields of computational linguistics an n-gram is a sequence of items from a corpus of language. An n-gram could be any combination of letters, phonemes, syllables or words, etc. Looking at n-grams is useful to help work out how language works and is used in everyday situations. Google […]
Continue ReadingMultilingualism
Multilingualism is the ability to speak more than one language. In some definitions this means speaking a language as a native speaker or to native speaker standard, however some definitions are more flexible allowing multilingual to mean being able to communicate in more than one language (though not necessarily to […]
Continue ReadingMother Tongue (MT) Influence
MT Influence or Mother Tongue Influence is when the grammar or vocabulary of a student’s Mother Tongue influence the way in which they use their Target Language or TL. For example, in Greek (and a number of other languages) people say open or close a light instead of turn on […]
Continue ReadingMonolingualism
Monolingualism is knowing and using just one language. This language will be the speaker’s mother tongue. Contrast this with bilingualism. where someone knows and uses 2 languages as mother tongues and also multilingualism where someone has more than 2 languages as their mother tongues. A person who speaks just one […]
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