Open Educational Resources for English Language Teachers

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...

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...

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....

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

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: ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

















