Baku: beautiful but undiscovered (repost)

Having recently returned from another summer school in Baku, Azerbaijan I reproduce here an article originally written for the British Council blog last year.

After travelling to Georgia and Armenia on short-term teacher training missions last year I was looking forward to my visit to the third country of the Caucasian triangle: Azerbaijan. I’d heard that Baku, the capital of the fast growing country rich in oil and other natural resources, was a notch above the capitals of its Caucasian neighbours: Tbilisi and Yerevan. Even so, I was in for a pleasant surprise – or rather blown away – when I arrived in Baku.

SLA research: still in the shackles of traditional grammar?

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research also needs a lexical revolution to free itself from the shackles of grammar tyranny. Rant alert!

Photo by richardoyork on Flickr
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I was recently asked to give a talk at a conference on the topic of writing. Since my main area of interest is vocabulary/grammar (i.e. language) rather than developing skills per se, I decided to take a more "lexical approach" to my talk and focus on error correction in L2 writing: both lexical and grammatical. I scoured a lot of research articles to glean the current state of knowledge about error correction or - as it is more fashionable to say today – corrective feedback.