I hope I wasn’t the only one who was shocked to hear that thanks to a new LPGA policy, it will be compulsory for all female golfers on the world tour to speak English.
Coming so soon after the Beijing Olympics, a time when I regularly admired the excellent English language skills of many of the [...]
In a multi-cultural class, I always try to keep a list of the students’ names on the whiteboard, less for me to remember (years of teaching has trained me to remember names pretty well) but more for the students to learn each other’s names, tricky sometimes when the names all come from different languages.
When I [...]
I just saw one of those newspaper articles linking Colombia with drugs that always makes my blood boil. It’s an article from news.com.au about tours of cocaine factories in Colombia. I’m only linking that article so you can see I’m not inventing this, but I hope nobody who reads this site is interested in such [...]
Excuse my ignorance, but I only just realised today how few nations there are that regularly allow refugees to come to live within their borders. The topic came up in my ESL classroom somehow - quite randomly, as many topics do - and eventually one Korean girl boldly asked me, quite incredulously, “Why does Australia [...]
If I ever wrote a book about my time in Japan, I hope it could come across as beautifully as Hamish Beaton’s experiences in Under the Osakan Sun: A Funny, Intimate, Wonderful Account of Three Years in Japan.
Like me, Hamish Beaton - “Mr Hamish” to his students - went to Osaka to teach English. Unlike [...]
News out of Moscow these days seems to alternate between another luxury hotel being built where people will have to pay a thousand dollars a night for a room, through to an extreme opposite - ordinary people are without hot water for weeks at a time. It might be summer, but that doesn’t mean that [...]
Languages just can’t be trusted. As a language teacher, I often see how dangerous it is to simply translate any concept word for word - relying on a dictionary as your only way of learning a language is bound to lead to problems. One really good example of that is the seemingly harmless verb, invite.
The [...]
My favourite kind of travel narrative is one that follows a journey with an unusual kind of goal: for example, visiting every city in the world whose name starts with “Z” or retracing the footsteps of some famous traveller. So when i read the blurb for Joe Bennett’s new book Where Underpants Come From I [...]
Japanese culture is a curious beast. Last weekend I showed my husband the Bill Murray/Scarlett Johansson film Lost in Translation, and it reminded me that it’s not a bad portrayal of the Western impression of Japanese culture.
I don’t profess to be an expert on Japan by any means - it’s a complex place. I lived [...]
Formal and informal ways to speak to people in other languages is a can of worms that I was reminded of last week as I watched one of my favourite Austrian TV shows - one of very few German language shows that are broadcast here in Australia - and I’m not ashamed to admit that [...]