top of page
Open Educational Resources for English Language Teachers
Search


Present in Style - Beginning English Powerpoint
I love making powerpoints. They lend themselves to visuals. It's easy to add music and video to them. Plus - you can project them onto...

Serena Gammon
Feb 17, 20211 min read


Let's get this OVER with #2
I've been wondering about the different senses of OVER an how they all fit together. Look at these different senses of the phrasal verb...

Serena Gammon
Jan 11, 20211 min read


Let's get this over with...#1
Let's visualize OVER in our minds. It is... A girl combing her hair A hand turning the pages of a book A bridge across a river A glance...

Serena Gammon
Dec 28, 20201 min read


Imagine UP #3 - adding schemas
I really think so much meaning stems from the core schemas. So far we have covered the UP-DOWN spatial axis, and the PATH schema for UP....

Serena Gammon
Nov 30, 20201 min read


Metaphors
I love metaphors. They lend themselves to imagery and they are endlessly creative. And they form much of what is creative and beautiful...

Serena Gammon
Nov 30, 20202 min read


Imagine UP #2 - Graphics for a Lesson Plan
You've already seen a lesson on "UP is higher on a vertical axis." But what if that axis becomes a path? We now access the metaphor: ...

Serena Gammon
Nov 17, 20203 min read


Imagine UP #1 - Graphics for a Lesson Plan
If you want to create a graphic for the classroom you have two choices: abstract image, or descriptive image. The abstract image is an...

Serena Gammon
Nov 17, 20203 min read


Core Images: A Video
This was one of my first videos about image schemas and conceptual metaphors. It's a bit scholarly, but it really goes into depth about...

Serena Gammon
Nov 17, 20201 min read


Mind Maps: The Cognitive Semantic Approach
Metaphors are great, but they need a bit of organization before they can be applied pedagogically, otherwise it's just so much more...

Serena Gammon
Nov 17, 20201 min read


Online Tool #2: The English Preposition Tutor
Welcome to the very first study to apply cognitive linguistic theory to a computer-based tutor program - meaning it uses conceptual...

Serena Gammon
Nov 13, 20203 min read


Core Meaning and Clay Modeling: A Lesson Plan
I think clay modeling is an excellent way to really visualize the core meaning of a particle/adverb/preposition, and then creatively...

Serena Gammon
Nov 10, 20202 min read


Clay Modeling - Serrano-Lopez, 2003
If you have children in kindergarten or first grade, you might have already seen this technique used. Instead of reading words or saying...

Serena Gammon
Nov 10, 20203 min read


Finding the Core - OUT
If you really want to understand the concept behind phrasal verbs, you need to begin at the core (Verspoor & Lowrie, 2003). And here's...

Serena Gammon
Nov 10, 20201 min read


Online Tool #1: The PHaVe Dictionary
I just have to give a shout out here to Garnier & Schmitt (2015) for creating this fantastic resource. Many researchers have used corpus...

Serena Gammon
Nov 9, 20202 min read


Illustrating Polysemy: Go on Butterfly! (Lesson Plan)
Most phrasal verbs are polysemous, meaning that they have more than one meaning. Let's explore this starting with the very first verb...

Serena Gammon
Nov 9, 20202 min read


Benjamin White's Teaching Model
Benjamin White (2012) proposed a new cognitive approach for teaching phrasal verbs. His lesson plan looks something like this: Reorient...

Serena Gammon
Nov 9, 20202 min read


Grouping by Concept - ON
It's common knowledge that categorizing new vocabulary, or placing them in groups, enhances memory retention. The most popular ways to...

Serena Gammon
Nov 4, 20203 min read


Conceptual Building Blocks: Spatial Primitives
SURFACE, PATH, LINK, CONTAINER: These four representational images are some of the most basic image schemas in the human mind, present...

Serena Gammon
Nov 3, 20203 min read


Landmarks, Trajectors, and Pompoms
We're going hands on in this post, creating a three dimensional figure to help us visualize the preposition on and how this tiny word...

Serena Gammon
Nov 2, 20202 min read


Space Grammar
Before we talk more in detail about phrasal verbs, let's talk about space. Not Outer Space, but the space around you and me - the...

Serena Gammon
Oct 28, 20201 min read
bottom of page