As we begin 2017, we’re going to cover some English words and phrases commonly-associated with the arrival of a new year.   If you need more help with vocabulary for celebrating the New Year, or any other aspect of the English language, contact the English Island in Atlanta. Our caring, passionate ESL teachers can create…

For this week’s lesson, we’re going to explain the meanings of some important end-of-year cultural and religious holidays observed in the United States. Next week, we’ll discuss specific vocabulary words relating to these seasonal traditions.   If you need more help with holiday vocabulary or any other aspect of the English language, contact the English…

Prepositional idioms are phrases where the meaning is determined by the choice of preposition. As with the idiomatic expressions we have looked at in the past, there is no “rule” for which prepositional idiom is correct in a given situation. This is because prepositional idioms have evolved through custom and usage as the English language…

Many common objects and ideas have different names in American and British English. In a previous lesson, we compared some of these words. In this lesson, we’re going to look at an additional fifty-six pairs, including words that have the same pronunciation but different spellings.   The left column in the chart below contains Standard…

This week we’re going to wrap up our lessons on idioms with a final eleven commonly-used English idioms. An idiom is a phrase whose meaning is different from the dictionary definitions of the words that comprise it. Idioms pose a special challenge for non-native English speakers precisely because you can’t determine their figurative meanings from…

Last week, we covered commonly-used correlative conjunctions, pairs of words which express relationships between equivalent ideas. This week we’re going to explore some additional correlative conjunctions. We’ll also cover several important rules for using correlative conjunctions correctly.   As … as As … as is used with an adverb or an adjective to compare similar…

This week we’re going to demystify another ten commonly-used English idioms. An idiom is a phrase whose meaning is different from the dictionary definitions of the words that comprise it. Idioms pose a special challenge for non-native English speakers precisely because you can’t determine their figurative meanings from their literal meanings.   English has thousands…

Correlative conjunctions are pairs of words which express relationships between equivalent ideas. Each pair expresses a particular type of relationship. Correlative conjunctions are not interchangeable. You cannot “mix and match” part of one correlative conjunction with a part of another. In this lesson, we’re going to cover four of the most commonly-used correlative conjunctions in…

This week we’re going to cover an additional six commonly-used English homographs. Recall from our last lesson that homographs are words with identical spellings but different meanings and sometimes different pronunciations. The homographs we’ll be looking at this week are especially challenging because they have identical pronunciations. In other words, the differences in meaning are…

In the previous two lessons we covered homophones, words with identical pronunciations but different spellings and different meanings.   Homographs, on the other hand, are words with identical spellings but different meanings and sometimes different pronunciations. While the distinction between homographs is usually obvious in spoken English, the difference in written English is often dependent…