bits and pieces.

This has been one of those frustrating days when I don't seem to have achieved much, apart from wade through paperwork and little bits and pieces. The writing retake exams seemed to have gone without a hitch, and the entries for the speaking and listening exams in december appear to be all on course, so I'm happy on that count. As for preparations for the conference - hmm, slower than I want. It's all started to appear far more real now and I can feel the slow dread hand of panic starting to creep over me.

deixis midnight runners?

Have you ever heard of deixis? no, neither had I until yesterday.
A quick question for Irish or Scottish readers out there:is the phrase 'will you have/be having a cup of tea?' more polite than 'do you want a cup of tea?' Is it preferred to 'Would you like a cup of tea?', and does it have the same connotation of politeness?

lost time

I hadn't realised how much time had elapsed since my last posting on this site. This is partly due to being so damn busy at the beginning of term, and partly to lassitude in filling it in. In all honesty however, I haven't been doing much since then in terms of study or research. It's getting the opportunity to do some that has been the problem.
anyway, here's some information about what I'll be doing next month at the EnglishUK Teachers' conference. I'm up against Adrian Underhill, so I suspect I'll be playing to the TEFL equivalent of one man and a dog called Colin. I will be dealing with Tenses in English and the Notion of Distance. My key idea is that we can understand the English Tense system by visualising it in terms of relative proximity to the speaker's point of view; That is, we can deal with tenses by seeing them as being 'here', 'there', or 'in between', and that by using this process we can give answers to the reasons why we choose particular forms to express concepts relating to futurity; explain why certain conditionals and polite forms choose to use'past' forms of the verb; and why we need to use 'to' in order to create the full infinitive in English, and how the full infinitive has a consistent, single and remarkably simple function when used in verb patterns (but not with certain adjectives); And also to suggest that one particular piece of grammar has been presented inaccurately since God Knows When.
That's the idea, anyway.