English Toolbox Tips

When you register for the English Toolbox site and get your unique user name and password in your e-mail, make sure you copy and paste them into the fields in the upper-right corner of the home page.  This will reduce mistakes caused by typing the characters incorrectly, which will lead to a rejection of the login information.  Once you are logged into the site, you'll be able to change your password to something easier to remember. 

We asked you for suggestions for contest topics, and you came through!  Lots of good ideas, but we thought the best was from Jim V. in Dubai.  He wants to know the best mnemonic devices that trainers use to help students remember a key language point.  Jim gets five free English Toolbox credits for his winning submission.

Get your favorite mnemonics to us by 7 August to have a chance of winning five free credits of your own.  And "don't forget" to check this page often for new announcements, tips and ideas!

We're adding lots of new exercises focused on the hospitality industry (hotels, restaurants, catering, tourism, etc.). These span all levels, and include both grammar and vocabulary. To see what's new, go to the Search engine and enter "hospitality" in the "Exercise Name" field: check back regularly to see the newest activities.

For the remainder of the summer, we are offering our HTML Interactive Exercises for half-price. These usually cost two credits per exercise, but we've reduced them to one credit each during this special promotion. We encourage all of our subscribers to try more of these HTML versions of our MS Word activities. We also hope that more English teachers will subscribe to take advantage of this 50%-off sale while it lasts! We hope you all have an "interactive summer."

In our last contest, we asked you for tricks for teaching correct word order in a sentence. Paul D. in Costa Rica reminds his students that place always comes before time (e.g., "I went to the store on Saturday," not "I went on Saturday to the store."). To help them remember, he reminds them that the letter "p" comes before the letter "t" in the alphabet: therefore, "place" comes before "time." Good memory device, Paul--you get five free credits!

For our next contest, we'll award five credits for the best suggestion from our readers for a contest topic! Frankly, we're running out of ideas, so we're turning the next contest over to you. Send your topic ideas to info@englishtoolbox.com by 20 July, and don't worry if you're not yet an English Toolbox subscriber: you can still get the credits and use them to download exercises. Good luck!

We’ve added several new exercises related to travel (vocabulary, helpful phrases, idioms, etc.). Go to the search tab, and enter “travel” in the exercise name field to see what’s new.