Classroom reflections

Ear worms or brain worms?

Something that’s grated on my ears for years is how English users in Russia will say “working day” instead of “workday.”

It sounds clunky to me, and worse still, like a translated version of рабочий день.

Last week I decided to finally look up whether there was something else going on — and there was!

Here’s the Google Ngram for “my workday” in American English since 1980.

Anything before 1980 is prehistory.

But if we skip across the pond…

Eureka!

It turns out that “working day” is by far the more popular of the two expressions if we’re working within British English. This dialect is the standard taught in Russia, so this makes perfect sense.

Now I know.

It’s always worth checking

Another chunk I often run into is students writing “worth of.” For example “It is worth of trying,” “I thought it was worth of it.”

This one bugs me plenty because … where is it even coming from?

Then I realized that this chunk actually does exist but only in fixed phrases regarding quantity, not quality.

If you know, you know.

An experience is worth having; an action is worth taking; a film is worth seeing.

However:

Dollars and cents.

These cases all form a noun phrase like “dollars worth of damage” or metaphor “a week’s worth of work.” Teaching this chunk rather than the word “worth” by itself might help to fix this error among learners.

Another feather in the cap of the lexical approach.

Resources of Least Resistance

Learners often leave a lot of resources on the table, sometimes literally in Russia, where teachers have to pick up after them at the end of class. One of the places where this often happens is with the Listening section of the IELTS.

Learners complain that their comprehension of these texts depends on the topic. This isn’t really true: nothing you’re asked to identify on the IELTS requires topic-specific knowledge.

I always encourage listening to each track once for the problems and again to capture interesting lexis or to note pronunciation features from the recorded voices. They come in a variety of accents and are all “standard” enough to be intelligible to a global audience.

Learners rarely do this, though, and it’s a mistake:

No one track should have all that lexis.

All of this language comes from a short Listening section about booking shuttle tickets from an airport to a hotel. Here we can find two idiomatic ways to say “expensive,” presented in context, the format for “-friendly” compound adjectives with some relevant examples, collocations with “offer,” etc.

As a narrative, the track itself is easy to understand, and it is so rich with lexis that it’s a shame not every learner takes full advantage of this resource.