Leoxicon.blogspot.com Website Review

The sun rises in the east - a commonly used example of the Present Simple In a recent discussion in one of the Facebook groups (this is what seems to prompt my occasional posts these days), the Present Simple was referred to as one of the HARDEST tenses for students to get. This made me wonder whether the Present Simple, contrary to what its name suggests, is indeed not so simple, or it is just another one of those teacher-induced neuroses. Lets see why theres so much ado about A friend of mine has mastered English - which is attested by a CPE certificate - by looking up a word and carefully studying examples in innovations. First, they started providing definitions using a controlled vocabulary - in the case of Longman it was the Longman Defining Vocabulary (LDV), a carefully graded list of the 2000 most frequent words in English, similar to Wests General Service List (GSL). Second, they shifted the emphasis from purely defining meanings to highlighting usage through carefully chosen examples. As dictionary publishers moved increasingly towards online platforms in the 2000s - and some discontinued the printed version improving learner experience. Todays online learners dictionaries (see the list in my Essential lexical tools common error warnings. All this makes a good learner’s dictionary an essential, indeed indispensable, learning tool. Yet, despite their obvious benefits, I find, much to my regret, that online dictionaries are underused by learners and teachers alike. Here are some activities to get your students using learners dictionaries and hopefully starting to appreciate their value. I hope you enjoyed the traditional end-of-year news quiz I posted last week. As promised, heres a follow up: lots of activities aimed at reviewing and practising vocabulary (and a bit of grammar) from the quiz. If you havent seen the news quiz, click HERE teachers notes are provided at the end of each level - not as a separate file. For a suggested sequence of activities, see last years News Quiz Follow Up - click HERE