English News

The Oxford English Dictionary defines comprehension as simply ‘the ability to understand something’. More specifically, the term ‘reading comprehension’ can be understood as…

The development of a child’s spelling and vocabulary skills is crucial for all aspects of learning across the curriculum. As I mentioned in my last blog post, knowing words, and being able to…

April 23rd is United Nations English Language Day. This date was chosen because it is Shakespeare’s birthday (thought to be 23rd April 1564). Shakespeare’s plays and poems have had an…

In 1999, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) declared that every year the 21st March was to be World Poetry Day. Why would they want to draw our attention to …

A number of us may be familiar with the term ‘semantics’ when used in an idiomatic sense, i.e. ‘that’s just semantics’. This kind of statement is often used as a…

‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a delightful story written by Lewis Carroll (a mathematician whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). The story originated from an experience when Carroll…

In December, I posted a list of 15 classic book titles that I suggested children should add to their reading lists. A few parents have asked why their children should read these books, as an old…

Semantics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the meanings of words and their relationships with other words of similar or different meaning. Children have to learn that a word may have a…

There has been much debate about whether or not creativity is learnt or inherited. This has been researched from many viewpoints including both sociological and medical. Recent studies (2013) at the…