ESL with Mr Zul

Don't prejudge it before you have all the necessary information...   This is one of the best short films I've ever seen, which can be watched on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQQIOMubFAI ). To ESL teachers, using short films like this in the English classroom for discussion about how to write a film review would be part of an active and meaningful English language teaching-and-learning activity.

Imagine having to write a poem in English when you’re not a poet–you’re not even good at writing poetry in your native language, and the poem must contain 50 words telling a short story! That was the assignment given by Alan Maley, a British poet who, at the time of this writing, has been involved in English Language Teaching (ELT) for 55 years. I can still vividly remember struggling to write such a poem in addition to a nine-word “diamond-shaped” poem during a poetry workshop conducted by Maley at the International Conference on English Language Teaching 2013 at Equatorial Hotel Melaka, Malaysia. I must say that Professor Alan Maley was excellent at coaching us all–his workshop participants. That was eight years ago. At this point in time, under Malaysia’s Third Movement Control Order (MCO 3.0) during the COVID-19 pandemic, I’m staying at home recalling the aforementioned poems whose soft copies were stored on a couple of hard drives a few years back; one of them is now broken–not ...

  Punctuation Matters (pun intended) 1)  Why "punctuation matters"? Let me tell you why punctuation matters.  😅  2)  There are lots of memes about punctuation on the Internet, one of which is this. Image by  winkgo.com  via   https://winkgo.com/57-bad-grammar-memes-that-prove-punctuation-is-important/ 3)   The judge said, "Hang him ,  not free him. Wait. Hang him not ,  free him." Punctuation saves lives, doesn't it? Image by  MobilityWare  via   https://appadvice.com/app/free-hangman/289265443