First post of 2025!
Nowadays, I don't have the opportunity to do much IELTS feedback, paid or volunteer. Instead, I'm teaching at an international high school, where English is spoken all the time, and the way I teach English would vary somewhat from what I do for IELTS candidates.
That said, one thing that isn't all that different about the English I look at now vs. in the past is in the most common errors that are made. Teenagers make the same kinds of language mistakes as adults, and there are a few general types of errors that show up consistently and over time.
The Big Four:
- Article errors (a/an, the, Zero)
- Repetitive structures (overuse of "be")
- Plurals - (subject/verb agreement primarily)
- Countable/Uncountable Nouns
I throw a fifth one in here - spacing of punctuation marks - but that seems to mostly be a Myanmar thing.
How better than to communicate these trends than to "monsterify" them into creatures with a little help from generative AI.
Once I had created this menagerie, I had to let them speak for themselves.
How better than to communicate these trends than to "monsterify" them into creatures with a little help from generative AI.
Once I had created this menagerie, I had to let them speak for themselves.
