Reported Speech: What She Actually Said
At CDG airport, it was snowing. Vanessa had been waiting for four hours. She said: "I knew you would make it." Years later I still replay that sentence. In English, to tell someone else what…
Category: English Teaching
Relative Clauses: Who, Which, That, Where
Réunion is the island where my daughter was born. The hospital where she arrived was small, clean, and impossibly calm. The nurse who handled the C-section had been working since 4 a.m. Relative clauses pack…
Articles: A, An, The — The Rules Nobody Tells You
"I want a water." I said this on my first week in Sydney. The waiter stared. Water is uncountable — you don't say a water unless you mean a bottle or a glass. Articles were…
The Passive Voice: When the Action Matters More Than the Actor
💬 From my own experience: In hotel incident reports, we always wrote 'The bottle was broken' rather than 'Tom broke the bottle.' That passive form is not evasion — it focuses attention on the event,…
Modal Verbs for Advice: Should, Ought To, Had Better
My first mentor at Merivale said: "You should taste before you pour. You had better know your list. And you ought to remember every regular." Three modal verbs, one shift. I learned all three that…
Present Perfect vs Past Simple: When Time Matters
When I arrived in Sydney in 2005, my English was, in my own words, horrible. A customer once asked me, "Have you ever worked in hospitality?" I said, "Yes, I worked." Wrong. I should have…
Writing a CV in English: Structure and Key Phrases (B2/C1)
🎙 From the classroom: I've written my CV in English, French, and Bengali. The English version is the hardest — not because of language, but because of culture. A British or Australian CV is concise,…
Small Talk at Work: Starting Conversations in English (B1)
🎙 From the classroom: Working at The Ivy in Sydney, I learned that small talk wasn't small. It built the relationship before the transaction. A guest who felt genuinely noticed would order a better bottle,…
Giving a Presentation in English: Structure and Signposting (B2)
🎙 From the classroom: I've given dozens of training briefings to hotel teams in Sydney — shift handovers, product launches, standards updates. The teams who remembered information were the ones who could anticipate the structure.…
Job Interview English: Tell Me About Yourself (B2)
🎙 From the classroom: I've been interviewed in English in Australia, and interviewed over fifty people for front-of-house positions in Sydney restaurants. The candidates who stood out didn't have the best CVs. They had the…