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Mosquitoes, Spray and Toothpaste

I pity Italians who are struggling to learn English, I really do. Unfortunately, Italian discovered English quite a long time ago and the language is now littered with words which look, on first sight, English. But when English speakers hear these borrowed words, they might not always recognise them.

Mesothelioma and Asbestosis in Italy

Around 1,200 cases of mesothelioma occur every year in Italy. Up until the end of the 1980s, Italy’s production of asbestos was second only to that of Russia. Asbestos was also used widely in Italy, until its use was banned in 1992.

Teachers and students.

Last night, an ex-student and friend of mine and I got together for a pint and a chat about our summer holidays and the three-week language course he did in Dublin. As he was feeling rather nostalgic about his Irish experience, we drank, yes, you guessed: Guinness. Between sips, it was very interesting to hear […]

On Teaching Lawyers

I’m running a course for a law firm at the moment, and the experience has led me to reminisce. I used to work with lawyers, or solicitors as some are known in the UK, and legal executives, and I remember these people fondly. There was this rather Dickensian chap called Robert Earl, who was quite […]

Teaching by not teaching

While drifting around the www looking for information on flash photography I came across this quote: “The trick to education, is to teach people in such a way that they don’t realize they’re learning until it’s too late.” The person who uttered these wonderful words was the late Harold Eugene Edgerton, MIT professor and flash […]

Miffed, I am.

I got the ‘we want to do more speaking’ comment from my students today. Yet they make no attempt to try using English while working in pairs or groups as they do one of the activities I have set them. This is despite my repeatedly telling them that they need to speak in English. It’s […]

Saturday night’s all right for…….

….working!  Yes, that’s right.  I’m working.  Other half and little one have gone off down to Genova.  This means that I can get on with preparing for a meeting on Monday.   The meeting will be about a new course I’m cooking up with another guy.  This other guy is an expert on certain things financial […]

Italians and language learning.

I’ve heard this comment many times from my Italian students. It basically goes ‘Italians are not very good at/incapable of learning other languages’. Well, I have an appropriate response to this oft made comment: ‘bollocks’ (si equivala approssimante a ‘palle’ in italiano, credo). Sorry about the slight vulgarity, but sometimes it is one of the […]

Moodling

Moodle, if you do not know, is a course management system or CMS (Joomla is a CMS too, but in Joomla’s case CMS stands for Content Management System). Moodle basically allows people to develop and run just about any course for just about any subject on-line.   It’s open source and its free.  The Open University […]