Sorry about the radio silence for the past...month >.<;

I was on vacation and now that I am back work has been a bit high speed. Hopefully by next week I can get back to posting! Till then here is an excellent picture about the English language!

Oh yes! New question on stackexchange...

So I also asked a new question on stackexchange. My students have all started to say things like "Do you can play tennis?" Or "Where went you last night". Over- and underuse of 'do' in English! I asked for a little help figuring out why these were wrong and why we use the 'do-formation' in English. Well, I got way more than I needed! Lots of people went so far as to explain the technical linguistic reasons! Which, I must admit, reminded me why I fell in love with Linguistics in University...and makes me desperately want to study it some more!
However, I ended up choosing the answer that explained, quite succinctly I thought, the reason we need or don't need to use 'do' in English.

P.S If you noticed the link on succinctly I highly recommend that website for definitions! They provide definitions in increasing levels of English!

Booking a Hotel Room

So similar to my telephone cards I also made booking a hotel room and a reserving a table at a restaurant. Same idea, a couple of different phrases and with the all important, "Can you spell your name please", question. None of my students like that one! They hate having to spend their names, it seems to be very difficult to remember the letter "h" for Germans...I'm not quite sure why.
Wow, so I have had this post half-finished for three days! I came home from work on Thursday night and the internet had decided to go away! Silly internet...

Cool website I found...

Have you ever heard of Stackoverflow? It's a community for programmers to ask questions about programming, or even practice their programming skills as they answer other people's questions. My husband uses it all the time, he thinks it's pretty great.
Amazingly the other day I was searching for an explanation for the difference between that vs. who for people (Yes, English speakers do use 'that' for people, but not often. If you stick to 'who' for people you will almost always be correct. Use 'that' for things or job titles. Hopefully I can get a post up about that today!), and I found this webpage Stackexchange. It is a community of people talking about English word history, and English grammar explanations. I think it's amazing! Well, right now, we shall see how long my interest lasts!

My user name is Istable, so far I have asked two questions. This one about 'decline' vs. 'decrease' and one about 'have you ever been' vs. 'have you ever gone'.

I think this website will be helpful for me to improve my English grammar (i.e. get practice answering grammar questions) and also be a useful resource for my own study of English grammar. : )

If I want to eat my 'after-table', I will have to practercise...

On Friday I taught my first set of Business English at an office!
It actually went fairly well, the office seems pretty laid back. Which I was not expecting. Today, I went in for my second lesson with them, and the one lady got me a coffee and another student brought me some cookies! So I am taking that as an 'we don't mind you as our English teacher" sign. : )
On Friday in the lower level we did conversing on the telephone!
In order to get all of the vocabulary for taking a phone call or making a phone call, I tried to elicit the phrases from the students, the one is a secretary so she didn't have too many problems with that. I had handy little cue cards ready with the different phrases you need for answering and making phone calls. Each was colour coded to the type of speaker and the action. I thought it was pretty neat! The participants liked it, they said it was a very intensive lesson, which I was worried meant that they didn't like it. However, they all came back today and said they want to keep the pace that I have set (we will see how long that lasts!!!).
To sum up:
Taught polite telephone English/business telephone English, with cue cards. After we had the cue cards all laid out in the correct order, we practiced dialogues until they could do the dialogues without the cards : ).
P.S for those of you wondering about the title: In German dessert is Nachtisch and a direct translation is after table, my German friend who knows some English asked my husband if he was ready for his after table. I think it was a joke, but I am not sure. Either way we liked it! And the practercise, is a new favourite of mine. One of my business English students wanted to say that she needed to practice her English and that she needed to do exercises in order to do that. And she said "I need to practercise...", and the damnedest (excuse my french!) thing was I almost let it go! I almost didn't catch it. Then I thought wait a minute, you want to what?! Ah, so excellent :) We both had a good laugh...

Here are the cards I made for the telephone conversation, I hope you can see it, you might have to zoom in on your browsers!

I will figure out how to turn it soon promise!

Minor Freakout...

So I 'm going to go teach at my first business today....can you say no sleep?!?!
And I forgot to do my photo copies yesterday so I have to leave an extra hour early....*deep breath* Calm blue ocean....calm blue ocean.....

Background Design

So I found my background design on this photoblog.
Thanks again Nils!