In the summer of 2009, I had a wonderful opportunity to spend three weeks with a group of Tajik English teachers. One of the teachers said that her students would like to have a book of stories about American teenagers. When I returned home, I couldn’t find a book like that, so I began to interview ordinary young people about their everyday lives and send the interviews to some English teachers and learners. When I asked teenagers for an interview, they almost always said, “But I don’t do anything special.” I told them, “That’s exactly what I want: ordinary life and ordinary English.”
Television Dialogue: The Sitcom Friends vs. Natural Conversation
This book explores a virtually untapped, yet fascinating research area: television dialogue. It reports on a study comparing the language of the American situation comedy Friends to natural conversation. Transcripts of the television show and the American English conversation portion of the Longman Grammar Corpus provide the data for this corpus-based investigation, which combines Douglas Biber’s multidimensional methodology with a frequency-based analysis of close to 100 linguistic features. As a natural offshoot of the research design, this study offers a comprehensive description of the most common linguistic features characterizing natural conversation...
Have you ever been confused by two different English nouns that are names for the same thing? Think, tomato sauce and ketchup, or chips and french fries! In this lesson, Emma explains some of the differences between British and American English Vocabulary. That’s right – there are different English nouns for the same types of food, depending on where you are in the world! Arrrrgh! Learn and practice your vocabulary with Emma! Cook. Eat. Learn English!
