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Three ways to improve your use of prepositions

Here are three quick and dirty ways to get to know your prepositions: Read a Book There are books out there, like anything else, specifically geared towards learning and understanding prepositions. One that I recommend is English Prepositions Explained by Seth Lindstromberg. It approaches it from a cognitive linguistic perspectives that, in my opinion, works…
Conferences

The first day of the JASELE conference in Nagoya has finished. Great to be there with all my fellow postgraduates, teachers, colleagues and friends. Heard some good talks and as usual I learnt a lot. But I am ashamed to say that I still feel like the outsider when it comes to conferences. I don’t…
Surface or iPad? That is the question.

I have been tossing about which tablet to buy. For me the question is productivity-based – I want to be able do word processing on the road. Lugging around a PC hasn’t been fun. And often I just give up. But look at my choices I see that Microsoft is coming out with their Surface…
The Culture of Plagarism

Undoubtedly, there is a plague of plagarism. In our day and age of internet and searchable data it is almost impossible to plagarize and not get caught. The short of it is don’t plagarize if you are an academic of any worth.
Zen and (the Art of) English Language Teaching

I will be giving a talk at the Hiroshima JET Orientation on 15 August 2012 entitled Zen and (the Art of) English Language Teaching. It will be about what we can learn from Zen and apply it to teaching English on the JET Programme, in which I was had been a participant. Before I was…
Blog revamp

I have changed the title of the blog to my name – Warren M Tang – and upgraded the blog design to reflect the new direction this blog is heading. While the blog originally was about corpus linguistics only, I have personally moved on to other areas, and so a more generic title is necessary.…
Download AntConc

A copy of AntConc (Laurence Anthony’s excellent corpus linguistic program) can be obtained from: http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/antconc_index.html. [Update] And here is my short tutorial on how to use it.
Introduction of elite language education at Tokyo University

It’s about time such a program was introduced anywhere in Japan. Tokyo University will start streaming some students into an elite language program to groom future global leaders (13 July 2012, Daily Yomiuri). Although many unversities in Japan have something similar running nothing with such vision and aim is available. Tertiary institutions have to take…
Word Grammar

Came across a new-ish theory today – Word Grammar. Its creator and champion is Richard (Dick) Hudson at UCL. Seems worth exploring as a theory. Considered a minor branch of cognitive linguistics.
Teaching function words: the cognitive and corpus perspectives

I will be giving a presentation on function words, what we can learn from corpora about them, how we understnad them in light of conceptual metaphor theory and what this all means for second language teaching. The venue and date: PanSIG @ Hiroshima University, 16 June 2012.