Many years ago, I thought about becoming an opera singer, as I had a knack for singing and was informed I could become a professional.

Since that day, I’ve always wondered what would have happened if I had chosen that path.

So I was interested to see this tweet from @MacMillanELT. Simon Gfeller is helping people to improve their pronunciation using operatic techniques. I am in the process of looking at his talk, which I hope to try and apply some of his ideas.

We often suggest to our students that they learn songs to help master new vocabulary…

Level: Intermediate

Duration: 15 mins

Theme: English, gender

Tasks: Comprehension questions, video, exercise on pronouns

Teacher/Student Answers: Here. (May need request from englishclassesforthemasses@gmail.com)

Exercise 1

1. What do you know about the acronym LGBTQIA+? What does non-binary mean?
2. Do you know any other political or social acronyms?

Exercise 2

Watch the video below and answer these two questions, either alone or with your teacher.

1. When did Owen first know he was queer?
2. How else did the new mayor make history?

Exercise 3

Watch the video once more and answer true or false. …

I really like a little onomatopoeia. The French language, for instance, is choc-full of words that sound as they are written.

So is English in fact. I was pleased to see the above tweet from @EnglishTips4U (with a linked article). There are lots of activities you could design around onomatopoeia:

• You could show your students the panels of a cartoon, and get them to put in the appropriate “bangs” “whooshes” and “slurps” in the right place.
• You could create a mime game using a variety of onomatopoeic words.
• You could get your students to try and…

It often seems to be one of Twitter’s most persistent conversations — the differences between US and UK English (with other English types jumping in)…

Some US accounts are baffled by the UK way to pronounce “ts”:

The UK, of course, takes issue with some US pronunciation:

But aside from pronunciation debates, there are lots of words in British English that don’t appear in the US, and vice versa, with some words being used differently.

Grammarly decided to enter the fray…

This is the month where things start to slow down. Working becomes hard. English Classes for the Masses had a little break. However, we’ve just been back on Twitter to see what interesting English tweets have appeared over the last week. First out of the gate:

It’s one of my favourite phrasal verbs on a hot day: to “wear out.”The example in the tweet above gives you a very clear example. …

So…

There’s a pronoun that’s often badly taught by English teachers, and that pronoun is “they.”

It’s clear that saying “he/she” is inelegant, and could be offensive by not being exact.

But don’t worry, “they” is to the rescue. Take this sentence:

I don’t know who “they” were, but “they” left us a large sum of money in our post-box.

Who is the “they” here? The answer is either: 1. Several people 2. An unknown person of unknown gender.

Perhaps we don’t feel gender is important, as indeed, when is gender really that important to a great…

Level: Advanced

Duration: 15 mins

Theme: English, technology

Tasks: Comprehension exercises, video, vocabulary builder

Teacher/Student Answers: Here.

Exercise 1

Discuss these questions with a teacher or fellow student, or answer them yourself.

• What does “invaluable” mean? (is it something very useful, or totally useless?) What things can we say have value?
• Have you ever tried to invent something?
• Do companies sometimes try and get you to buy products that are not very useful? How do you feel about this?

Exercise 2

Watch the video below, and look out for the answers to these questions. …

English, like a lot of languages, can have words that have vastly different meanings, depending on how you use them.

“Bomb” is one such word.

If something is “the bomb” then we mean, as @RealEvilEnglish points out, something really good, perhaps even the best. Yet if a play “bombs” or a film “bombs” it is no great success at all. To “cost a bomb” implies something costs a lot of money. There are few different meanings from a single word here. …