he articles here cover a whole bunch of English Usage issues.
We answer all those kinds of awkward questions your TEFL students ask : why do we say this instead of that?
Which means that each article also includes advice for the TEFL teacher: what you should teach and what just isn’t worth mentioning to your class.
Finally, if you’ve a question about how we use the English language, feel free to contact ICAL TEFL and we’ll answer it here!
Oh language! Do we want to go down the route of there being no rules, just a few nebulous suggestions which change over time? Are we like the freethinking parents at sports day who declare that every child wins because they are all special? Or are we on the side […]
I was asked this question the other day by a learner of English; quite simply, do we MAKE or DO a presentation? If you go online there are different stories, but as usual I went along to Google n-grams and checked out what they had to say. It’s interesting. Prior […]
Got and Gotten are often considered to be synonyms in British English & American English. However, this is not so and there are a number of differences between their usage. In British English the past participle of the verb, to get, is got. I have got 3 parking tickets this […]
In linguistics, a filler is a sound or word in speaking used by someone to show that they haven’t finished speaking yet but are either forming their thoughts into speech or mentally searching for the right word. Common fillers in English are: um – /um/ er – /ə/ However, we […]
The debate about using fewer or less when referring to quantity still rages. It is related to the concept of descriptive vs prescriptive grammars. In terms of historical origin, less has been used continuously in English for hundreds of years to refer to comparative quantity with all nouns whilst the […]