ONE CLICK ENGLISH

As the days get shorter in the northern hemisphere and winter approaches, many people will be looking forward to Christmas. As an EFL teacher, I know what that means – the song “Last Christmas” playing repeatedly! It certainly seems to be a favourite here in Poland. The song was originally released on December 3, 1984, and George Michael's melodious tale of jilted love has since been absorbed into Christmas tradition, to the extent that wherever you are in Europe during the festive season you seem unable to escape this timeless piece of synth-pop. Regardless of whether you love it or hate it, “Last Christmas” has been around for forty years now – yes, forty years! – and its popularity shows no signs of fading, despite attempts to ban it from the airwaves. When the Wham! track initially hit the UK Singles Chart, it managed to stay at number two for five consecutive weeks, held back from the top spot by Band Aid's “Do They Know It's Christmas?”, the lyrics of which poignantly...

Much has been written recently about AI and its potential to profoundly alter the course of human history. Such warnings tend to evoke a certain science fiction film in which humanity fights for survival in a future world dominated by machines. But if I can divert your attention away from the Terminator franchise for a few moments, I'd like to present you with some research on artificial intelligence in the world of ELT. In a recent survey conducted by the British Council , teachers were asked if they agreed with the statement “AI and automated translation will eventually make learning languages unnecessary.” Reassuringly, a significant majority disagreed. Teachers' jobs seem safe for now, although some private schools in Europe may have seen a drop in the number of students of late, probably due to the economic climate. The way I see it, AI offers more opportunities to improve speaking and writing, in addition to what a flesh-and-blood teacher does. Furthermore, teachers can u...

When not teaching English, I try to teach myself a little Polish or Spanish. It's the former I struggle with more. Polish is a highly inflected language and even simple utterances can invoke several grammar rules. Translate the sentence 'I drink green tea', for example, where there is a subject followed by a verb, an adjective and finally a noun. In Polish, you not only conjugate the verb, but also make the adjective agree with the gender of the noun AND change the endings of both of those words as they constitute the object of the verb. Do you see what people mean when they say that Polish is a hard language to learn? I know I'll never speak the language perfectly, but no one is asking me to. Therein lies a problem when it comes to language learners' expectations: Some people want perfection; they want to be fluent and flawless. Very often, though, you can't be both. You might speak English fluently, but make a lot of mistakes. On the other hand, you might spea...

'To those who care about punctuation,' writes Lynne Truss in her bestselling book Eats, Shoots & Leaves , 'a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence.' The book is heavy on hyperbole and seeks to entertain as well as educate its reader, but it also highlights a growing concern among some people about a perceived decline in standards of written English. Facebook is littered with poorly punctuated comments left by folks who show scant regard for apostrophes, commas and capital letters. How many times have you seen "it's" (with an apostrophe) in place of "its"? It strikes me as odd that lots of people fail to observe this simple rule: Use "it's" when you mean "it is" or "it has". You might shrug your shoulders and say, "Who cares?” before I earnestly protest that if we expect high standards in other forms of public communication, t...

A train threads its way through the darkening suburbs of Liverpool as bright orange flames leap up from people's gardens. It's Bonfire Night, and my fellow drama students and I are going to see Macbeth at the Royal Court Theatre. There's some excited chatter about the prospect of seeing Pete Postlethwaite in the lead role. Other than that, my memories of that evening are rather blurry, hardly surprising when you consider that it was more than twenty-five years ago. For anyone not familiar with English customs, Bonfire Night takes place annually on the fifth of November and commemorates the failed plot to destroy the Houses of Parliament in 1605. It is believed that William Shakespeare's play Macbeth was performed for the first time in 1606, so it's quite possible that the famous playwright was working on it when Guy Fawkes, a chief conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, was discovered in a cellar underneath Parliament along with dozens of barrels of gunpowder. Natural...

There's something a little bizarre about someone peddling cosmetics at 30,000 feet above sea level. Bemusedly, I watched a heavily made-up flight attendant push her trolley full of wares up the aisle of the plane to London. Things were about to get a lot stranger. I'm not really a fan of big cities. Frankly speaking, I don't think the word 'big' does London justice; it's home to more than 9 million people, which is greater than the population of some countries, and it's estimated that 300 languages are heard among its many residents. I didn't hear anywhere near that number at Stansted Airport, but I certainly heard English spoken with different accents. After hauling my suitcase onto a crowded tube train, I headed for Euston Station, where another train would take me to the quaint market town of Sherborne in Dorset. I was to spend the next four weeks at a boarding school in the employ of Devon School of English. The summer of 2018 was one of the hott...