Recently, I‘ve been looking at ways to support young learner engagement through the use of readers online. Readers can help you to reach out, motivate, connect with and stimulate your young learners and help them continue on their English language learning journeys. They can provide a fun, energetic and multi-skilled learning environment. And there are many free software tools out there that can help. Why not set up a reading challenge? Make it challenging but achievable in terms of how many books you expect a particular group of learners to read and within what time frame. Create a colourful ..read more

It seems to me that we often fall into the trap of viewing readers as an added extra in English language teaching, when in fact readers can offer so much more and be an integral part of a young learner’s English learning journey. Readers make learning English a positive and fun experience. Readers anchor vocabulary and language in varied and meaningful contexts. They support all of the classroom and coursework learning, and extend that learning by presenting the vocabulary and language in multiple scenarios. Readers can also provide essential practice and preparation for the Cambridge Young Le ..read more

In our fourth blog post about the new edition of COBUILD English Usage, Julie Moore looks at some more of the changes in language usage that emerged from research for the new edition. In this post, she explores how language shifts reflect changing ideas about mental health and disability. As I identified in my last post, our survey of current usage for the new edition of COBUILD English Usage uncovered evidence that new words, new combinations of words and new uses have developed in recent years to better describe the diversity that exists in contemporary society. In this post, I explore th ..read more

In the next two blog posts about the new edition of COBUILD English Usage, Julie Moore looks at some of the changes in language usage that emerged from research for the new edition. In this post, she explores how language shifts reflect changing ideas about gender and identity. Traditionally, identify has been used predominantly as a transitive verb; you identify someone or something: Police identified the man from CCTV images. We correctly identified several of the plants. Our survey of current usage for the new edition of COBUILD English Usage has shown that a new use has become ..read more

In the second of our blog posts about the new edition of COBUILD English Usage, Penny Hands details some of the findings that came out of the team’s research into the ways in which new words and uses are created. The second stage of the COBUILD English Usage update involved a survey of the current state of various aspects of the English language. It was carried out specially for this edition using the constantly updated Collins Corpus, as well as social media research and crowdsourcing. It’s all very well having billions of words of corpus, but how do you find new words in it? It’s for t ..read more

In the first of our blog posts about the new edition of COBUILD English Usage, Penny Hands details some of the changes she made to the examples to ensure they reflect changes in society, and ponders on how future-proof these changes are likely to be. One of our aims for this edition was to have a really close look at the example sentences, as our hunch was that society has changed so dramatically since the last overhaul that there would be work to do bringing things up to date. Looking back at the brief for the last edition in 2011, I see that we were worried about authentic example ..read more