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I recently asked a colleague, Dominic, if he would kindly answer some questions about his experiences of teaching English as a foreign language. “It's for my blog,” I told him. He eyed me suspiciously for a moment, but then said he would cooperate on the condition that I don't use his real name. So, Dominic, when did you start teaching? I answered a job advert on Dave's ESL Cafe in 2015. It was for a teaching position in a town in Poland. I'd just completed a CELTA course and I thought that teaching abroad would give me an opportunity to see more of the world. That's what I thought, anyway. Something tells me that it wasn't what you expected? The owner of the school in Poland was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a weirdo. The walls of his office were covered with photographs of various people he'd met on his travels -- hundreds of them -- and there were cameras installed in the classrooms. He routinely spied on my lessons. He didn't always pay me on ti...

Languages evolve over time, and English is no exception. Indeed, a native speaker of English might struggle to understand someone speaking the language as it was spoken in England five hundred years ago. In this post I look at four ways in which this lingua franca of the globalised world has changed since the days it was largely confined to the island known as Great Britain. 1. Word order The order of words in a sentence typically follows a subject-verb-object pattern; however, this hasn't always been the case. Whereas now you hear people say 'She picked the flowers', for example, some Middle English texts placed the object before the verb, so 'She the flowers picked' would not have sounded unusual in the 16 th century. This shift in word order sometimes happens today, when people exchange traditional wedding vows, the phrase 'With this ring I thee wed' being one well-known example. 2. Pronouns The pronouns 'thou' and 'thee' have fall...

Amid the earth-shaking headlines this week, one headline in particular has caught the attention of both students and teachers of English alike: Skype is shutting down. A representative of Microsoft said in a blog post , “We will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams.” Like many people, I was a little taken aback by the announcement, having used Skype since its release in the first decade of this century. The platform has enabled me to keep in touch with friends and family, in addition to facilitating countless English lessons with people in different countries. The word 'Skype', like 'Google', inevitably became a verb as people began 'skyping' each other back in the 2000s, with 4 billion registered users by 2019.  Undoubtedly, Skype has helped to shape modern communications, and it played a particularly important role during the pandemic, when competing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet also kept people connected. Microsoft Teams has gro...

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 Spanish or Polish, the latter of which I find particularly challenging because 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 h...