In context or with co-text?

Photo by @Mr_Schenk via eltpics

About a month ago I took part in a debate entitled Teaching Vocabulary: in or out of context where I was on the team defending teaching vocabulary in context. I hereby confess that on occasions I had to resort to unfair tactics to win the debate. While making the case for teaching vocabulary in context, I argued, for example, that the word goal should be taught together with either:

achieve

or

score

Conference fatigue or post-conference blues?

Yesterday I completed the online feedback questionnaire for the IATEFL 2013 conference, which took place earlier this month in Liverpool, and, inevitably, started thinking back to the conference. It was the fourth IATEFL conference I've attended - superbly organised as ever - and probably the most intense one. Whether it was the fact that my hotel was not so close to the venue or the number of sessions on offer every day or the number of sessions I wanted to go to every day – but at the end of the week I was absolutely exhausted.

The Lexical Approach: 20 years on...

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Michael Lewis's "The Lexical Approach", the book that has changed the way many – but unfortunately not enough - teachers teach and see language. I just wanted to share with you my plans  for this anniversary year.

What corpora HAVE done for us

Sinclair's seminal work -
the bible of corpus linguistics

In this post I would like to defend linguistic corpora and their relevance to the ELT field which Hugh Dellar raises doubts about.

Years ago before I became familiar with corpus tools (corpus as in linguistic corpus = "collection of samples of real-world texts stored on computer"; plural = corpora) we had a fierce debate with my colleagues whether to use the preposition to or for after the noun hint. We wanted to produce posters for English learning centres we had set up for a number of high schools and each poster was meant to provide "Hints for/to speaking / listening etc".

Binomials

Photo by @aclil2climb via eltpics

Binomials are two word expressions (strong collocations) such as "dead or alive", "give and take", "law and order". 
In this activity inspired by a short film activity on FilmEnglish, students become more aware of binomial pairs in English.

Grammar rules... again?! Chunks strike back

This is a somewhat belated reaction to Catherine Walter's article which appeared in the Learning English section of Guardian last autumn. Click here to read it.

Language or maths?

Spaarnestad Photo via  Nationaal Archief

Dr Catherine Walter’s article Time to stop avoiding grammar rules defends explicit grammar teaching in EFL. Proudly subtitled The evidence is now in: the explicit teaching of grammar rules leads to better learning, the article makes numerous references to a "wide range of studies" that have shown evidence of effectiveness of explicit grammar teaching.

Start teaching lexically in 2013

Many readers of this blog have read my rants about badly designed coursebook or digital activities and heard me moan about preoccupation with single words in ELT. This has probably left you wondering what kind of approach to teaching I actually believe in. This post describes the main principles of lexical teaching.

News quiz 2012 - vocabulary review

Making history
By Alexandre Inagaki via Flickr
[CC BY 2.0]

I hope you and your students enjoyed my traditional end-of-year news quiz I published earlier this week. If you haven't seen it, it's still not too late - follow this link

Activities below are aimed at reviewing the language from the quiz. Scroll down to view handouts for students (2 levels) and teachers notes with answers.

Part A reviews verb + noun collocations (e.g. make history)

Traditional end-of-year news quiz 2012

Photo by Sandy Millin via eltpics

A bit less heavy on political news this year and featuring more sports, showbiz and gossip items, here is my traditional annual news quiz. As in the previous years, it is available in two levels: upper-intermediate/advanced and lower intermediate, and comes complete with 7-page teachers notes (scroll all the way down). The notes contain ideas on how to use the quiz in class and, no less importantly, how to explore the language. Check back in the first days of the New Year for vocabulary review activities (update - click here)

Top 12 of 2012

and tips for new bloggers

Photo by aclil2climb via eltpics

This post is written in response to Adam Simpson's blogchallenge, which, he admits himself, is an act of "shameless self-promotion". And this is a man who urged us not to vote for him when he was recently  nominated for annual Edublog Awards and who was also the winner of last year's TeachingEnglish blogathon! Anyhow, here is my Top 12 of 2012.

The Principles of Principled Eclecticism according to Chia Suan Chong

A summary of the closing plenary (Mis)-Applied Linguistics at the TESOL France colloquium on 18 November 2012

Chia explaining 'stealth pair work'

Chia Suan Chong started her plenary at the 31^st annual TESOL France colloquium by warning us there would be 65 slides in her PowerPoint and introducing the concept of stealth pair work – speaking quietly, in a muted voice with a person sitting next to you. Considering the fact the audience consisted of about 200 ELT teachers, this wasn't an easy task. I had been really looking forward to this talk, so I was prepared to shut up for 60 minutes. I had expected Chia to debunk ELT myths and show how certain findings of applied linguistics research have been misapplied in ELT. Instead, the talk went in a different direction as Chia took us on a journey through the history of ELT.

Explaining the difference between (near-) synonyms

I have recently received an email from a colleague, an EFL teacher in Israel, about how her students find it difficult differentiating between near-synonyms. I repost here my reply alongside the original email with the author's kind permission.

Hi Leo, I wonder whether you can help me. Do you know any place on the web where I can compare the meanings of near synonyms? I've used the concordance type sites which give me lots of collocations, but that isn't what I want. It doesn't help my pupils to give them 10 collocations for each word (e.g. regular, usual, routine) some of which are identical. I need to be able to put my finger on a general rule(s) like, one is for people and the other is for abstract ideas (I know this example is irrelevant to those particular words) Thanks for any help you can provide. Renee Wahl