When you are at university you need to take notes in lectures. This is something you can practise online with video lectures (about your field of study or some elective courses you might take) so you develop the skills you need before you start university. In this post, I explain how to take lecture notes, … [Read more…]
My fantastic students have added to the set of open-access SDGs Lesson Plans we are producing. At the moment, there are only 4 of the SDGs without lesson plans and this should be remedied by January, all being well. Feel free to download the plans. All are available as PDFs for your convenience, or as … [Read more…]
Hannah from the Futurelearn contacted me recently to let me know about courses that the British Council have free IELTS preparation courses available. It says that there is a price on the page BUT it’s free if you only want access to the course for 5 weeks. You only pay if you want to see … [Read more…]
There are so many different standardised tests available to test your English skills: the Cambridge certificates, TOEIC, TOEFL, IELTS, BULATS and, here in Japan, the Eiken/STEP test. For a lot of people, these tests are pointless. If you need the certificate to get a job or a college place, go for it. If not, read … [Read more…]
Here is an idea about taking vocabulary notes. I am taking notes like this to study Japanese and I think it might be useful to some of you who read this blog.
Sometimes you need to give ideas about what you think happened in a past event, including the reasons why. In this post, I’m going to give you some help to speculate about the past.
Question tags are a part of English that a lot of non-native speakers make mistakes with. Here’s a quick guide to some of the most common tag questions.
The apostrophe (‘) is one of the most difficult punctuation marks for native speakers to use correctly. Here is a simple guide to its use. You may also want to check out this punctuation guide, too.
This is a very basic punctuation guide. It should help you with academic English and also English for general purposes.
Whenever you write, it is advisable to vary your sentence structures in order to keep your readers’ interest. In this post, I’ll show you an easy way to do this using relative clauses.