Learn English @EASE

It might, for example, be decided to have the mother tongue used as a medium of instruction in the primary school so as to ensure that the child's educational development is rooted in his own cultural heritage, and then transfer to a foreign language as the medium for secondary education. Or it might be thought more practicable to introduce the foreign language at the beginning of the child's school career, but restrict its use to the teaching of certain subjects. Criper and Widdowson, Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching, Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics As beginner specialists, we used to experience some difficulties with subjects of major during our first and second years at the Faculty of Education. The difficulty derived, for the most part, from the mountainous amount of new and specialised vocabulary. After all, we weren't taught primarily in English when at school. Neither did we have to worry about new vocabulary at all. The task has usually been ma...

More than once, other people who read or listen to me say I have a good choice of words or I choose my words carefully. Perhaps they are right, but sometimes I get confusing or unclear about what I try to say. Luckily, I have learnt to avoid this early enough in my life. When I am serious about what I'm writing or saying, I usually check every word I think can cause confusion or misunderstanding. During my participation in the Online Writing Collaboration project with IUP (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA), some Americans who read my posts told me that I could fool other people into thinking I am a native speaker of English. I took it seriously ever since. I wanted to keep this and worked on this purpose since then. One of my posts in that forum (OWCp) was about a word I thought was misused - purposefully or unintentionally - in the media. That word was "Fundamentalism". I used my dictionaries to check whether the meaning used in the media is correct and I found us...

  We, as Egyptians or Arabs, learn English because of a rainbow of reasons. Asking a school student this question: 'Why do you like English?' will very likely elicit the answer: 'Because it's a nice/an easy language'- easy compared to Arabic of course! Impressionistically speaking, a particular language can be nicer or easier than any other language. My students have often said that Arabic is the easiest language on earth. As an objective informer, I used to tell them that this is not true unless Arabic is compared to other languages via objective common criteria. But since such criteria are not there, I feel obliged to agree with them. But what makes students say English is easier than Arabic? A seemingly convenient answer may be that English textbooks are more fashionable than those of Arabic. The typography varies widely from English to Arabic. Every possible facility is employed to make English texts appeal to the reader. I am personally impressed at how tin...

There's a group of English language words that often cause problems to learners. These are: can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might and ought. These words are in a way used to help compose sentences - like am, is and are for example. Consider: I can come tomorrow. Can, or any of its sisters, add something to the meaning of the sentence. However, they cannot stand alone in a sentence. The problem is that they do not have one particular use. Their uses are many and the time element contained in them is not one that follows the regular behaviour of words like "goes" or "went". For "goes", for instance, we know that it expresses the present time and "went" the past. Nonetheless, does "could" mark a past time? The immediate answer to this question is: it depends on the context. So now, how can one master the use of such words? That'd be the subject matter, i.e; content, of another thread. At Your Request

In tribute of: Hanan Mohamed, Abrar Ibraheem, Aya Medhat, Azza Abdel-Azeem, Margaret Sameer, Cristina Magdy, Mohamed Hammouda, Mohamed El-Sayyed, Mostafa Mahmoud, Marwa Hamdallah, Amira Ghallab, Sally Samaan, Doaa Rushdi, Sarah Mohamed, Eman Mohamed and Ragya Abu El-Nabayel. BBSA/GRP batch # 14 – Suez, September 2009   Ladies and Gentlemen, I feel obliged to write something to you as a kind of modest response to your generous gift. In our situation today, a gift can mean either or both of the following: it can be a parting gift; to say goodbye, and/or a sign of appreciation. Personally, I don't like to think of it in terms of the first. And if you meant the second, sincerely, the small card with your words was enough and much appreciated. Whatever you did it for, thank you very much indeed. However, let me elaborate on this memorable incident in my life. It is not the first time I receive a gift from people who happen to come to my class; it is perhaps the second. When I find mysel...

Most learners of English as a foreign language make mistakes while speaking or writing. Of course, that is not because they are bad learners, but because – particularly here in Egypt – they do not get enough chances to be exposed to the language in natural contexts. Mistakes are tolerable so long as they do not hinder communication. If you can make yourself clear with some grammatical mistakes, it is fairly acceptable. Problems arise when one's mistakes block their being understood by other people. Nonetheless, some people need to be not only fluent language users, but also accurate speakers/writers. That might be because they care about their image in the eye of their audience; or maybe they feel they should not make any sort of mistake. No matter why one may need to sound accurate – as well as fluent – it is always a good thing to be so. One of the most frequent mistakes I noticed is the absence of words like "am, is, are, was or were" when they must be there....

This letter was written to pay tribute to trainees of FGF's BBSA/GRP batch 12 who graduated in my class in February 2009. I thought I could share it with more BBSA/GRP graduates whom I had the honour and pleasure to teach. FGF is the Future Generation Foundation offering Egyptian graduates the powerful training package BBSA (Basic Business Skills Acquisition) and its extension GRP (Graduate Resource Program). The week I talk about is the last week of the batch during which graduates give their final presentations.   Ladies and Gentlemen,   It was a greatly wonderful week we spent. During that week we shared glorious moments together. Pleasure was the characteristic feature of the week. Success was the title that summarised all the activity that was going on. Unity rose as the evidence of unique achievement.   Many a person came to thank me for all I did for them. I must confess that it was a generous gesture of those people to say so. Nonetheless, all I did – assuming that I did an...

[This articles was written in 2006 as a contribution to "Language and Linguistics" paper magazine which I started while studying for the general diploma in English at Ain Shams University.]   One day, a mother rat and her son were searching for food in the kitchen. They met the cat. The mother rat barked like a dog at the cat. The cat got scared and ran away. The mother rat said to her son, "See! Now you can understand the importance of a second language".   This joke brings to mind the question of second language(s). Knowing a second language has saved the lives of mother rat and her son. You can imagine what could have happened if mother rat didn't know a second language so powerful as a dog's barking. Mother rat and her son were facing an enemy. They could either run away, if they could, or give in and save their strength for struggle into the cat's guts.   A second language is a language you learn that is not your mother tongue – the language you hea...

  A teacher is someone whose job is to teach in a school or college. This is a dictionary's definition of the word. Yet, if you asked different people who they think a teacher is, a multiplicity of answers will accumulate. Yes indeed. Because every single individual looks at a teacher from his own view of the person who can assume the responsibility of teaching others.   A teacher, one might define, is a person trained and qualified to perform a job of instruction. To this end, a teacher is no better than a TV of radio station which broadcasts informative materials so that anybody can get to know what they broadcast. No. A teacher is the person who works in a school and takes part in different school activities, including teaching. This way, a teacher is no more than an honest employee who fulfils the duties assigned to him. That's not it. A teacher is the one responsible for training learners in a particular branch of knowledge. Training . Yes. That's the word. ...

Life is all about people; we live among them. People are our family, friends, spouses, coworkers, neighbours, children, fellow citizens, members of parliament, authority officials, teachers, students, salespeople, tradespeople, you name it. Every day, we interact with other people. New relationships are born and other established ones break. In every aspect of our life, there's the people element: what would people say if I did this? What would they say if I didn't? I want to do this because it would make my people happy. Or I want to do that to make those people suffer. In our folk culture, there's a saying that goes "heaven without people won't be heaven for anyone." Another saying suggests that people make people; in other words, we are who we are because of other people's influence on us. I believe that virtually any people relationship can succeed provided that the people involved are ready to listen and show understanding to one another. We are i...