Teaching in Lebanon - May Mikati's Blog

Every year there are winners. Here are this year’s winning words from various sources: • Chambers Dictionary – “Overshare”: The Gua...

Punctuation appears to be declining in importance. In the UK, the Cambridge City Council considered removing punctuation from street names ...

As part of their course reflection once, my students were meant to describe how they had used the library, and one of them wrote that the...

In my previous blog post on motivation in language learning, I indicated that I would be following up on the subject. An opinion piece ...

The Guardian newspaper’s Education section on “The Case for Language Learning” shows a number of interesting recent entries. Geoffrey B...

Anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf emphasized the link between language and culture decades ago. They hypothesized...

A couple of years ago, I blogged about “ Banned Words ” on the occasion of the official French ban of “Mademoiselle”, which was replaced...

I recently gave a conference presentation on “ Risk Control in the Blended Learning Environment ”. My research showed that online teachin...

Most of the students I come across do not seem to consider grammar to be an exciting part of their learning though they do appear to real...

Different dictionaries have identified different choices as “Word of the Year” for 2013.   Merriam Webster, America’s leading dictionary ...

Let’s face it: teaching is not a prestigious profession in many parts of the world – even university teaching. Having researched this subje...

Perseverance pays. When I started blogging in 2011, few - if any - other teachers in Lebanon were blogging about their teaching or work re...

My last blog post was about apocope, the dropping of one or more sounds at the end of a word. In fact, sounds may be dropped at the beg...

Do you find the word “university” formal and stiff? Do you often say “uni” instead? If so, then you are committing apocope: the omission...

Have you ever left a gathering without saying goodbye? If so, then you have “ghosted” – in a different sense, of course, than that of ghosti...

As mentioned in my previous blog post, ghost writing is a sad global development in academia. In fact, it is not only global in scope...

Yesterday a university colleague referred me to an article in one of the best known Lebanese newspapers citing me on student cheating: ...

Most sources would agree that the top five languages in 2013, judging by the number of speakers, are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, A...

When I discovered Twitter, several years ago, I did not find it appealing at all and therefore did not subscribe to it. I was already usi...

On the occasion of National Grammar Day in the U.S., this posting focuses on a puzzling grammar point. Recently, I managed to provoke an ...