Authors Electric

I have a friend who’s currently an ESL teacher living in Turkey. He’s also a retired professional photographer who used to supplement his business by selling photos of his lunch – but that’s a whole different story! Steve messaged me the other day and asked if I had any stories he could use on his YouTube channel .  I’ve never come across this kind of thing before and it struck me as such a good idea – for those learning English as a second language, for reluctant readers or those wanting to increase their vocabulary or just want simple, engaging and easy to understand stories in audio format. Steve reads short stories aloud and the accompanying words appear on the screen. Didn’t Jackanory or other such children’s tv programme do this many years ago? I’m sure I remember watching television in the 1970s or 80s – after Play School and before the ‘infant’ offering (what were these? I can’t recall), John Craven's Newsround and then the ‘junior’ offering (a children’s drama or Blue Pete...

When I visited my two-year-old granddaughter Daisy a few days ago, I hadn’t seen her for about four weeks, and one of the things I noticed was that her speech has progressed enormously. I was particularly struck by her starting to use the word ‘been’. This word never gets much attention from adult speakers – it’s a taken-for-granted sort of word that even the most ardent grammarians pretty much ignore (can grammarians be ardent, I hear you ask. You’d be surprised). ‘Been’ is a bitty little filler word that pops up in constructions like the present perfect progressive (‘I have been looking at the flowers’) and its less common future variant (‘I will have been sliding down the slide’). Years ago, when I studied computational linguistics (trying to get computers to speak English and other natural human languages), I remember writing a set of syntax rules for parsing or generating speech – and wondering how on earth to classify ‘been’ – is it a verb, an adverb, a particle…? In the end, I ...