In this Issue

Welcome to the February 2005 issue of MED Magazine, the monthly webzine of the Macmillan English Dictionaries resource site!

February 14th, or Valentine's Day, will be a busy day this year not only for shops selling flowers, cards or chocolates, but for mobile networks too. For the last couple of years traditional greeting cards are increasingly being replaced by text messages. In our regular column about new words in this issue, we explore the language of text messaging.

This month the language interference series returns with an article about the Maltese language. The article describes the main influences that helped shape the language of Malta over the centuries, and the problems speakers of Maltese face today as a result of the continuing impact of English.

The feature article discusses an area of language often neglected in vocabulary teaching: word elements. Author Michael Vaughan-Rees explains what these are, and why it is important for students to learn about them.

In this issue we conclude the short series on teaching essential Business English language and skills. In this final article you can find some useful tips for teaching socializing skills, and a set of activities with teacher's notes and answers.

Punctuation is the topic of the Study Skills article. Here you can read an overview of how capital letters and the most common punctuation marks are used in English.

To browse the back issues of MED Magazine, or to find out more about a particular topic, visit the Index page. On this page you can view the covers of all the back issues.

If you'd like to get in touch with us, please fill in and email this form. On this page you read a selection of comments we've received from readers around the world.

Kati Sule
Editor