Em Turner Chitty teaches English as a Second Language at the University of Tennessee's English Language Institute. She is the author of How We Really Talk: Using Phrasal Verbs in English, and Spelling and Sound: Spelling Common English Words. She also appears on the Irish/Appalachian album Mountain Laurel, available from etchitty@gmail.com
All my life I have sung, but singing jazz standards with Just Friends (of Lance) has been really challenging and really rewarding. Let me tell you about the band. It all really starts with Brian Sward, on the right, who plays guitar in his sleep, I think, and transcribes songs for fun. He got a … More Just Friends (of Lance) Jazz
The first full day out of Tennessee, June 2, I stayed in Abingdon, Virginia, at the Jubilee Retreat Center, which is run by the Catholic Church. I highly recommend looking for such retreats–they are in beautiful places, they are quiet, and they are relatively cheap, all things that I value greatly. I wanted to bike the Virginia … More On the road to Damascus
I am a Senior Teaching Associate at the English Language Institute of the University of Tennessee. Like all of our instructors, I teach a wide range of courses–Reading, Writing, Grammar, and Listening/Speaking–all year round. My favorite course to teach is probably grammar. I find it challenging to explain to students the odd features of our … More English Language Institute
As I left Knoxville and headed North on the first of June, it was threatening to rain. I didn’t care. I needed to get out of Knoxville, urgently. Conflicts at work were dragging at me and I could not shake thoughts about them. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate. Knoxville needed to be left in the dust … More Traveling North
So this is a picture of Siena, a city in Tuscany in Italy. After a summer of teaching ESL at the American School in Switzerland in 1982, I rode with my friends Dani and Bruno by bike through the Appenines from southern Switzerland to Siena. Dani’s girlfriend, later wife, Marlies, was taking a cooking class … More The Tent in Siena
I don’t know why, really, I was willing to take a month, a whole month, and go away from my home and my job. Some of it had to do with a turning point in my life. I turned 60 a few months ago, which surprised me a good deal. I never expected to live to 60. … More ON
Technical and Scientific Editing With over 30 years of experience in editing, and over 15 in technical and scientific editing, I offer professional editing services for scientists who are preparing professional papers for publication in scientific journals. As an ESL teacher, I’m especially interested in helping scientists whose native language is not English. Here’s what … More Em Turner English Services
Want to know how we really talk? It’s in the language of phrasal verbs. I will be putting most of the book online in these pages, but if you want to get it, you can order it at http://www.amazon.com Here’s the link: http://amzn.to/14vvOD9
Many of the world’s great languages have been around, in one form or another, for thousands of years. Even though they are constantly changing and evolving, they still keep their identity: they have been “Arabic” or “Mandarin” over long periods of time. English, by contrast is a relatively young language. And it is … More History of English
Em Turner Chitty 