The Arizona-based band Hacienda Brothers describes their music as “western soul”, as they blend together country music and R&B (rhythm and blues). The song "A Lot of Days Are Gone," written by Jeb Schoonover and Dave Gonzalez, illustrates this style of music with the steady drums and cymbals, the electric guitar, and the bass. But perhaps most noticeably, the pedal steel guitar is featured in this song.

The pedal steel guitar is one of the most distinctive instruments of American country music, and is played by manipulating foot pedals, moving a metal bar (the ‘steel’) across the strings of the instrument, and plucking the strings with the fingers or a guitar pick. The lyrics of "A Lot of Days Are Gone" also express a typical country music theme: that of regrets for the events of the past, and longing for a loved one who has been lost.

Lyrics and Classroom Activities
Do you want to use this song in your classroom? Here are the lyrics and classroom activities to get started.

This section presents three stand-alone language-learning activities related to trains.

1. “Train Lineups,” designed for students at the Intermediate level and up, encourages students to speak and listen to one another and to cooperate to achieve an objective.

2. “Train Dictadraw,” for Intermediate students, helps students practice and produce vocabulary related to trains by describing and drawing.

3. “Who Gets to Ride?” is for Intermediate and higher levels and can be used to develop pair or group cooperation and critical thinking skills.

Students feel more comfortable in a new language when they understand its jokes. And when the jokes are puns, they build metalinguistic awareness. This article describes four categories of English puns—soundalike puns, lookalike puns, close-sounding puns, and texting puns—and suggests how they can be incorporated into English language classrooms.

Learners of English as a foreign language often find it difficult to understand figurative speech, which relies heavily on metaphor. This article explores why metaphors challenge learners and presents ways to incorporate metaphors into EFL instruction to help learners understand figurative speech. Topics discussed include cognitive metaphor, environmental metaphors, and culture-based metaphors.