Leoxicon

In context or with co-text?

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sun, 05 May 2013 19:30:00 +0000

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

score

otherwise, there would be no way to distinguish between the two senses of the word.

Or take the word key. How can you know, I argued, whether it is

a key to a door

a key on a keyboard

a key to solving the problem

In actual truth, what I was referring to is not context of a word but rather its co-text.

I first came across the term co-text when reading Michael Lewis's The Lexical Approach but later found out that it was probably first used by Michael Halliday, a systemic functional linguist, who distinguished between:

co-text – the linguistic environment of a word
context – the non-verbal environment in which a word is used

Put another way, the surrounding situation in which a word is used is its context whereas the surrounding words is its co-text, the most obvious manifestation of which is collocations.

Do we need Amelia Earhart to provide context?

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Let's look at it it in the context (!) of teaching. If I were teaching the word goal in context I could use images (e.g. Nelson Mandela) to evoke the life of a man who overcame difficulties in order toachieve his goals. Or I could wait until the word goal came up in a text, for example, the story of Amelia Earhart who was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Undoubtedly this makes vocabulary learning more interesting but does it result in better learning? After all, learners, especially adults, come to class with their life experiences and real world knowledge, and should be able to contextualise new vocabulary themselves. Co-text, on the other hand, is important because the way words behave differs across languages. To be able to use the word goal in English learners would have to know the verbs that commonly occur with it, such as

achieve / set / accomplish or score (if talking about football)

Photo by Shaw Girl on Flickr
[CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Likewise, if you're trying to explain the meaning of the verb to chop as cutting something into pieces, learners may simply map chop onto a word in their L1 which means cut (in many languages both words are the same, e.g. Russian). It would therefore be wise to supply the words that frequently co-occur with chop:

onion, garlic, pepper

without recourse to a Youtube video of a cookery programme to provide the context.

Too much hype over context?

Many teachers unfortunately equate teaching words in context with putting it in a sentence. This may not always be the most effective way. One study showed (Webb 2007) that presenting new vocabulary in single sentence contexts doesn't result in better learning of meaning or form. In fact, presenting decontextualised words with their L1 equivalents proved more effective than presenting new words in glossed sentences (two groups of learners were compared), even though the difference wasn't statistically significant.

So to revisit the question raised at the debate I took part in: whether I am really in favour of or against teaching vocabulary in context, I'd say that new words - especially high-frequency items - should not necessarily be taught in context but they should almost always be taught with co-text.

References

Webb, S. (2007). Learning word pairs and glossed sentences: The effects of a single context on vocabulary knowledge. Language Teaching Research, 11, 63-81.

Conference fatigue or post-conference blues?

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:28:00 +0000

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.

New format

I don't know whether the new format – 30 minutes for talks, 45 minutes for workshops – is the way to go. I felt 30 minutes presentations (including mine) were somewhat rushed while 45-minute workshops didn't have anything workshop-y about them. I stupidly put myself down for a talk and had to cut my presentation by half from its original 60 minute length - as it was given as TESOL France 2012. To do so I had get rid of all the interactive bits – not of the "talk to the person sitting next to you about what you had last night for dinner" variety but tasks where I ask participants to think of one-word equivalents for multi-part verbs or brainstorm the mistakes their learners make that may be caused by lexical voids (yes, I explain the term in my talk). But some, longer presentations I saw did not have any interaction with the audience and, in my opinion, did not merit the tag Workshop. Perhaps in future the organisers should make it clear - and be strict about – what constitutes a workshop. For example, this TESL Toronto programme makes a clear distinction between different types of sessions – scroll down to page 3.

Surprises and disappointments

Penny Ur and Jeremy Harmer's double act at the pre-conference event (PCE) organised by TTED SIG restored my faith in PCEs. Although I couldn't imagine two speakers with such radically different presentation styles, Penny and Jeremy struck the right balance between the amount of input and "output" giving us, the participants, plenty of time to discuss their ideas in groups and feed our conclusions back to the audience.

The British Council's forum on Continuous Professional Development (CPD) highlighting CPD activities in three different countries was logically organised and masterfully weaved into a coherent thread by Jane Cohen. Among other presentations by the British Council colleagues there were two presentations on using video: by Susanne Mordue and Sirin Soyoz who introduced lots of useful websites (still need to check out www.simpleenglishvideos.com and www.esl-lab.com/videoclips.htm) and Elana Boteach Salomon and Jonathan Rickard who shared lots of practical ideas - see the recording here.

As usual, the conference wasn't without a share of disappointments - and I am not talking about a severe lack of catering points at the venue. There was one session held in the biggest auditorium (capacity: 850 people!) where the speaker, whose name I won't mention, rushed through her slides apologising all the while that she was running out of time and finished within 30 minutes instead of the allocated 45. Constant references to the language learning experience of her four-year old grandson - an L1 speaker - in a presentation on L2 grammar learning, whose title didn't match the title in the programme, didn't help either.

Am I a closeted dogmetician?

- I tweeted from Willy Cardoso's talk. Willy addressed the issue of published ELT materials not reflecting the dynamic nature of the curriculum in a room with a heavy presence of the Dogme crowd. Unlike Willy's session, there were surprisingly no Dogmeticians in the audience at Nick Bilbrough's talk on working with emergent language in writing, which I also enjoyed. Otherwise there was clearly "the coursebook strikes back" feel this year with Hugh Dellar, Rachael Roberts and Herbert Puchta – all coursebook writers – arguing that teachers can focus on emergent language without necessarily chucking the coursebook out of the window. The Dogme vs coursebook stand-off culminated in a lively debate between Scott Thornbury and Catherine Walter which you can see here.

Social life
I find that the more I go to IATEFL the more I benefit from networking and interaction with members of my Personal Learning Network (PLN) - teachers from all over the world - and the breaks between the sessions are never long enough to catch up with all my friends. Thank you all with whom I had a chance to interact - over lunch, drinks or at the karaoke night - for making the conference special.

Lunch at Revolution in the Albert Dock with (from left to right):
Naomi Epstein, Sue Annan, myself, Katie Davies and James Taylor
Photo by Sandy Millin

Memorable quotes
"Seductive approach to teaching grammar" - Paul Seligson referring to Contrastive Analysis as a missing link in addition to deductive and inductive approaches

"PPP - Present Practice Pray" - Paul Seligson again

"PPP is like Margaret Thatcher; it's always there" - Anthony Bruton answering a participant's question about what is PPP (Present-Practice-Produce)

Conference summaries

Chia Suan Chong proved once again that she is the most prolific ELT blogger turning out session summaries in real time - often while the sessions were still in progress! See her summaries here

More IATEFL summaries, including one of my talk, can be found here on Jonathan Sayers's blog

Sandy Millin was tweeting extensively from the conference - you can read recaps of her tweets and session summaries over on her blog:

The Lexical Approach: 20 years on...

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 12:19:00 +0000

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.

Article

The Education section of the Guardian has just run my "accessible" article about why Lewis's lexical approach hasn't gained widespread currency. Judging by the comments it has reignited the debate about traditional grammar versus chunks and whether it is the publishers' reluctance or "consumers"' conservatism that hinders the spread of new ideas in ELT.
Click here to read it.

Special publications

I am currently guest-editing a special issue of the ETAI (English Teachers Association of Israel) Forum dedicated to the lexical approach with contributions from Hugh Dellar, Luiz Otavio Barros, Hannah Kryszewska, KenLackman and many others. The publication is only available to ETAI members but the good news is that in an exclusive arrangement with Humanising Language Teaching (HLT) - a webzine produced by Pilgrims - most of the issue will appear online as a special lexical edition of HLT towards the end of the year. Don't miss it!

Conference

Finally, the University of Westminsteris organising a conference on lexical teaching on 11 May. The conference featuring Michael Hoey and Hugh Dellar as keynote speakers will introduce you to developments in lexical approaches to language teaching in recent years and consider lexical teaching in areas such as EAP and exams, teaching the four skills and teacher training. Workshops given by Ivor Timmis, Mura Nava, Nick Billbrough and yours truly will provide practical techniques and tasks for the lexical classroom.

Lexical Teaching Conference

Registration is already open. So if you're in or around London - or fancy a weekend in London - don't miss this opportunity to hear first-hand from top lexical experts. For more information click here

I hope you join me in celebrating the year of teaching lexically.

What corpora HAVE done for us

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:48:00 +0000

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 toor 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".
Emails were sent back and forth about what preposition should be used and the argument inevitably turned to the British/American distinction until somebody used Google Fight to compare hints to and hints for. Google Fight provided us with pseudo-scientific evidence that hints for is slightly more common than hints to– it was back in the days when I was still blissfully unaware that Google search yields different results for different people and sometimes even for the same person on different computers!

That was before I discovered the British National Corpus hosted on the Brigham Young University website. Had I discovered it earlier I would have searched for Hints + Preposition and found that hints on something is actually more common than the other two options we were vehemently debating.

In his recent article Whathave corpora ever done for us, Hugh Dellar raises doubts about the usefulness of corpora to the ELT field. While not completely dismissive of corpus research and its value, Hugh basically argues that its effect on the language teaching profession has been enslaving rather than liberating. I find Hugh's polemic surprising considering fact that corpus linguistics is what gave impetus to the Lexical approach, of which Hugh is a staunch advocate (used the corpus here to look up a "juicy" adjective for "advocate"!)

Objective view of language

In the past 30 years corpus research has provided irrefutable evidence about how language works, not least that language is highly patterned in that it largely consists of recurrent lexico-grammatical combinations.

Starting with the Collins COBUILD project, corpora have revolutonised lexicography and changed the face of the modern dictionary. These days most respectable dictionaries – an indispensable tool for learners and teachers alike - include examples drawn from the corpus, frequency information and often register variation (if a word is more suitable for formal or informal contexts).

Corpora have shed light on many aspects of language which were previously described based on intuition. Instead of groping in the dark and anecdotal evidence we now have access to authentic language data. For example, in the past many grammar books presented "any" as a sort of transformation of "some" used in negatives and questions.

I have some time. – I don't have any time. – Do you have any time?

Corpus research has shown that any is more common in affirmative sentences (50% of all usage of "any") and not as frequent in questions (only 10%) as prescriptive grammarians would have you believe.

Frequency of lexical or grammatical items is useful for deciding which materials should be included in a syllabus. This is not to say that these should not be balanced by another consideration: relevance to the learner.

Corpora in the classroom: a boon or bane?

However Hugh’s main argument of corpora is its applicability to classroom teaching and relevance to teachers themselves. As a teacher I find corpora invaluable. Just the other day a student asked me about the difference between classic and classical. I came up with classical music and classic mistake off the top of my head but had to consult a corpus to find further examples:

classic example / case / symptoms / mistake / movie

classical music / composer / tradition

Such puzzles with confusable words can be easily solved by using the Compare function in BNC or COCA

No doubt some people are walking dictionaries and can (off the cuff) rattle off examples of usage but I would look it up in a corpus. Very often I give my students an answer about how a word is used and then consult a corpus or (corpus-based) dictionary to confirm my hunch. I am often right but sometimes I overlook certain patterns. And why not get learners to look up the answers themselves? Although data-driven learning (DDL) hasn't gained much popularity, there is some evidence that getting students to study language data (concordances) by themselves is beneficial to vocabulary learning.

Finally, Hugh argues that corpora make English as a foreign language unnecessarily foreign for non-native teachers by emphasizing certain dubious features of spoken grammar (e.g. "like" for reported speech) that we don't really need to teach learners. This is particularly ironic because Innovations and, to a lesser degree, Outcomes - coursebooks co-authored by Hugh Dellar - are packed with colloquialisms. Innovations Upper-Intermediate has a whole page devoted to vague language (sort of, kind of, -ish) - an important feature of spoken grammar of English. Perhaps I wouldn't teach "like" for productive use in an EFL context. But what about the determiner "this" which has a markedly different use in spoken language, as corpus studies have revealed? In contrast to written language, we often use "this" to refer to things NOT previously mentioned in spoken narratives to make them more vivid.

I saw this weird guy on the train yesterday.
And then there was this loud pop, like something exploded.

Corpora have provided us with more accurate language descriptions and informed dictionaries, grammar reference books and pedagogical materials. With various corpora and "corpus-light" tools (see here) now widely available online, corpora are no longer a remit of linguists but a valuable resource for teachers and learners.

For another rebuttal of Hugh Dellar's argument, see Mura Nava's post here

Binomials

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 23:42:00 +0000

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.

Binomials (also known as Siamese twins) consist of two words joined by conjunctions and, or and sometimes but, and are very common in English. The activity below is suitable for upper-intermediate and advanced students.

Step 1 - Video

A split-screen short called Symmetry was a jumping-off point for the ensuing language focus. We watched the film and followed stages 1-4 in the lesson plan outlined on Film English.

Step 2 - Post-watching

After watching, draw students attention to the following expressions

cops and robbers

fish and chips

salt and pepper

Ask students if they can think of other, similar expressions in English (you don't have to introduce the word binomial)

Step 3 - Matching

Divide the class into an even number of groups: A and B. If you have 4 groups you will need 2 copies of the handout below, if you have 6 groups – 3 copies etc (1 handout per 2 groups)

Cut the handout below in the middle (vertically) and distribute the cut-up binomials between the groups. Give the left column to groups A and the right column to groups B. Each group should have 13 pairs. Ask students to match the pairs.

Binomials Matching

Step 4 - Feedback

Ask all groups A and B to go to each other's tables and check their matchings. Clarify difficult items. Definitions and examples can be found in this dictionary: http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com
Life and death is part of the longer expression "a matter of life and death".

Language note

26 binomial pairs may seem too much for one lesson. However, only a handful of these are genuinely new items: your students will probably know some of these binomials and will no doubt know the individual words comprising most of them. Also note, Law and Order and Nip and Tuck are names of popular TV shows students might be familiar with.

My upper-intermediate students didn't know blood and guts, (play) fast and loose, odds and ends (Group A) and cut and dried, null and void, spick and span (Group B). If you think it's still too many items for one lesson, remove six and give each group 10 pairs.

Follow up

More contextualised practice in pairs/groups using the handout below. Note that some expressions in this activity didn't appear in the matching activity.
Students can look up the pairs they don't know using Netspeak (see related post here) or Macmillan dictionary which has an autocomplete function.

Binomials Activity

Language focus

Point out that binomial pair are irreversible, i.e. you can't switch the order of words in a pair. Draw students' attention to the sound patterns in binomials. Some of them rhyme (hustle and bustle, wine and dine) while many others are alliterated (bigger and better, part and parcel, prim and proper). According to research (Boers & Lindstromberg 2005), about 1/3 binomial pairs in English have alliterative patterns.

Extension
You can round off the lesson with the song "She" which contains a lot of binomial pairs and alliteration - click here

Homework
For further (decontextualised) practice, use these Quizlet flashcards or this matching game
More on binomials including a quiz on BBC Learning English

I hope your students enjoy the lesson and thank you to Kieran Donaghy (Film English) for inspiring the activity.

References

Lindstromberg, S. & Boers, F. (2008) The mnemonic effect of noticing alliteration in lexical chunks. Applied Linguistics 29(2): 200-222.

Grammar rules... again?! Chunks strike back

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 22:40:00 +0000

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 articlemakes numerous references to a "wide range of studies" that have shown evidence of effectiveness of explicit grammar teaching.

Although no sources are cited, the forthright and cogent tone of the article written by the co-author of How English Works, The Good Grammar Book and Oxford English Grammar Course (all with Michael Swan) would win over any ELT practitioner. As one would expect, to make her argument more convincing, Dr Walter talks with mild disdain about other approaches that have de-emphasised explicit grammar instruction and proposed instead:

"to expose learners to language that is just a bit more advanced than what they currently produce" (Krashen's comprehensible input hypothesis / the Natural approach);

"to wait until a communicative situation demands a certain structure before introducing it" (Task-Based Learning with reactive focus on form);

"to let the grammar emerge naturally from […] the lived context of the classroom" (Dogme).

One such approach which has dealt a heavy blow to the dominance of a traditional grammar syllabus is the Lexical Approach proposed in the 1990s and based on teaching chunks of language. Without beating around the bush, Dr Walter claims it is WRONG because there are hundreds of thousands of chunks the learner has to commit to memory. She states "With much less time and effort, learners can acquire grammar" (acquire grammar or learn a few declarative rules?) "for putting together comprehensible phrases and sentences".

Does the author imply that, unlike grammar rules, chunks do not have generative value? Surely, chunks can be equally generative. Imagine, your student learns

Could you pass me the salt, please?

which is a semi-fixed expression which allows variability and helps learners produce similar requests in other situations:

Could you pass me the water, please?
Could you pass me the ketchup, please?
Could you pass me the menu, please?
Could you pass me my phone, please?

Learning chunks actually facilitates the teaching of grammar and serves as a basis for mastery of the grammar system. Furthermore, grammar is best learnt when students have memorised a chunk which can then be used as a template for creating novel utterances. Let's consider, for example:

If it doesn't work out, you can always fire me.

Imagine how many "rules" a learner needs to remember here: no will after if, 3rd person doesn't and not don't… If they memorise it as a chunk, they can go on to produce:

If it doesn’t work out you can always move.
If it doesn't work out you can always go back to working part-time.
If it doesn’t happen…
If it doesn't get better…

Both Ellises subscribe to this view of grammar acquisition. Rod Ellis (Second language acquisition researcher) says that it is worth focusing on formulaic chunks initially before the teaching of rule-based grammar while Nick Ellis (cognitive linguist), coming from the emergentist perspective, maintains that by memorising and later analysing chunks learners bootstrap their way to grammar.

Native speakers do not realise how much they rely on stock phrases such as If I were you…, When it comes to… There's been a lot of opposition to…when communicating. By some estimates, between 50% and 80% of native speaker English – depending on the genre - consists of prefabricated routines and memorised chunks.

A number of studies have shown that learners across all levels use far fewer chunks than native speakers relying on word-by-word sentence building. The ability to produce appropriate multi-word phrases often lags behind even when students have mastered the third conditional. If anything, we should be advocating more – not less- chunk learning.

In the final paragraph of the article after elevating the role of grammar rules, Dr Walter, as if to pre-empt the imminent backlash by those on the anti-grammar side of the argument, acknowledges that teaching vocabulary is more important than grammar and there is room for both: a grammar syllabus and word lists…

There you have it: twenty or so years of psycholinguistics, SLAresearch, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics are thrown out of the window, and grammar and vocabulary are decoupled yet again. Ironically, those teachers whose teaching is no longer dictated by the outdated and largely discredited slot-and-filler model of language learning probably shrugged off the article. But those who have never let go of the hold that pedagogic grammar has on their teaching will now be vindicated and continue - with renewed vigour - battering their students with grammar exercises.

References

Ellis, N. (1996). Sequencing in SLA: Phonological memory, chunking, and points of order. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18(1), 91-126. Available at: www-personal.umich.edu/~ncellis/NickEllis/Publications_files/Ellis1996Chunking.pdf

Ellis, R. (2005). Principles of instructed language learning. Asian EFL Journal, vol. 7. Available at: www.asian-efl-journal.com/September_2005_EBook_editions.pdf

Walter, C. (2012, September 18). Time to stop avoiding grammar. Guardian weekly. Available at: http://gu.com/p/3aa24

Start teaching lexically in 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 17:05:00 +0000

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.

The term "teaching lexically" was coined, I believe, by Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley, coursebook writers (Innovations, Outcomes) and teacher trainers (University of Westminster), who have proudly taken over from retired Michael Lewis as torch bearers of the Lexical approach.

Before I go on, some caveats. This post is aimed more at people who are interested in the basics of the lexical teaching, so some of the suggestions may seem obvious to teachers familiar with the approach. Second, like with any post of this kind (Main principles of...), this is my take on lexical teaching and other proponents of the "lexical movement" may see things differently. Finally, as you're about to discover, teaching lexically doesn’t require a major upheaval in your teaching but rather minor "tweaks" to what you probably already do.

Principle 1:

Ban single words

Words are never – well, almost never – used alone. I can think of only a handful of words that can be used on their own:

Hurry!

Silence…

Tragic.

But most of the time words are used in company of other words. So why record them alone? Why teach accidentonly to find that a minute later your students say *He made an accident, when you can teach have an accident? Or why write on the board deprived and its definition or L1 translation, when you can immediately provide the nouns it often goes with:

deprived area / childhood / background

Make a habit of writing new words on the board with other words that surround them and encourage your students to do the same in their notebooks. Ideally, write whole phrases or sentences to illustrate how a word is used:

Have you done your homework?

They are investigating the murder of...

That's it. I'm drawing the line.

If time doesn't permit, write at least two words together.

do homework

investigate the murder (of)

intense workout

heavy rain

Remember: collocations - and not individual words - are minimum units of meaning.

Useful links

TeachingEnglish has a number of articles on teaching and recording collocations. OneStopEnglish offers expert advice on teaching vocabulary, including collocations.

Principle 2:

Explain less – explore more

Let's face it. We, teachers, love explaining. After all, if we don't, it seems like we aren't fulfilling our role and students' expectations. But many things in English (or any other language for that matter) simply cannot be explained. There is no reason why we say heavy rain and not *hard rain, why buildings can be described as both tall and high, but people can only be tall and how come if we can look, stare and gaze at people, we can look at but not *gaze at a problem. Why not? If I am looking at it for a long time!

By @sandymillin via eltpics

By constantly explaining and giving students - often dodgy - "rules", we actually do them a disservice. Instead of handing students the answers on a plate, invite them on a journey of discovery. And remind them that language is an organism not a mechanism; and many things in language cannot be explained because... that's the way it is!

Useful link

Humanising Language Teaching has a section entitled Corpora Ideas with a range of articles touching upon raising students' awareness of chunks, developing their tolerance of ambiguity and exploring lexis in class.

Principle 3:

English word ≠ L1 word

Shifting the emphasis from words to collocations and multi-word phrases not only implies recording new language in chunks. You should try to reduce students' reliance on word for word translation. For example, I refuse to answer the following questions:

What does (English word) mean?

How do you say ___(L1 word) in English?

Because it, of course, depends on

what this word means in a given context

and

what the student wants to say

If you use translation in class, get students to translate whole phrases or collocations. For example, earlier this month (see my previous post: News Quiz 2012 - vocabulary review), I drew my students' attention how soft is not the same "soft" in L1 depending on the nouns it goes with:

voice
soft skin
drink

And do mild cheese, mild injuries and mild sentence correspond to the same "mild" in your students' L1? I bet you'll find that, with the exception of scientific terms (e.g. appendicitis), there is NO word for word correspondence between semantic fields of L1 and L2 words.

Following on from Principle 2, if you set off on a journey of discovery, you should foster a culture of exploration in the classroom. Encourage students to ask questions about how words are used. Get them to look at the examples (and not only definitions!) in an online dictionary or show them concordances with the target word. Arouse their curiosity about language. You'll know that you've succeeded when students start asking you not only "What does the word mild mean?" but

What else can "mild" be used with?

Can we say "a mild punishment"?

Useful link

Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley often post questions that emerge from classroom discussions about language on their Facebook page

Principle 4:

Pay attention to what students (think they) know

This is important for two reasons. If students know take and place, does it mean they known take place? Or if they are familiar with both play and host, does it mean they will understand the meaning of play host (to)? What about make do (as in it'll make do for now)? The meaning of many collocations cannot be determined from individual words they are comprised of (these are referred to as non-compositional or idiomatic). Secondly, there are many collocations, whose meaning is semantically transparent (i.e. compositional collocations) which is precisely the reason why students fail to "notice" them and later have difficulty incorporating into their own lexicon.

Also, interestingly, most expressions in English (whether compositional or not) consist of the most common words such as: get, do, come, well, fall etc.

Hand of Time by Looking Glass
via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0]

I'm running late

it has nothing to do with...

I'm coming down with something

get a grip

lose your cool

make ends meet

do well in...

have a word with...

don't get me wrong

Advanced level students are often drawn to sophisticated words such as "dejectedly" and "amenable". But revisiting the words they already know and exploring new meanings associated with them (by virtue of new collocations) they can get more mileage.

Useful link

Luiz Otavio Barros in his post Teaching vocabulary: five tips you can't ignore talks about how to draw students' attention to new combinations of already known words. The other tips are worth noting too.

_______________________________

But what about grammar?

Another post on the role of grammar in lexical teaching will follow soon.

News quiz 2012 - vocabulary review

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 15:50:00 +0000

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)

Part B reviews adjective + noun (ancient civilization) and noun + noun collocations (prank call)

Part C is an extension activity providing additional noun collocates for the adjectives in B. It is assumed that most words here will be familiar to students, but some combinations (e.g. remote possibility) might be new.

You can do some contrastive analysis here and ask students to translate the collocations into their L1. They might end up with different L1 words for soft in soft drink / voice / skin. Remote in remote area may not be the same L1 word in remote possibility. Remind the students that they should not rely on word for word translations but look at what the word collocates (=goes) with.

There is a further review activity for adjective + noun collocations in Part C (upper level) - scroll all the way down.

Part D: The upper level version provides a further review of other lexical chunks from the quiz while the lower level version focuses on the Passive voice.

See Teachers notes for answers to both versions.

For more viral videos, see this article on BBC

News quiz 2012 - vocab review upper

News quiz 2012 vocab review lower

News quiz 2012 vocab review - ANSWERS (both levels)

Another revision activity for the collocations in Part C (upper-intermediate version)
For ideas on working with collocation forks, see this post
Adjective + Noun collocation forks

Traditional end-of-year news quiz 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 17:55:00 +0000

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)

Quiz

The London Olympics kicked off with a spectacular and at times peculiar Opening Ceremony directed by the acclaimed British director Danny Boyle. Who jumped from a helicopter as part of the Opening Ceremony?
In October 2012 the New York Stock Exchange was closed for two consecutive days for the first time in over a hundred years. What caused the shutdown?
The music video for "Gangnam Style" by the Korean singer PSY went viral in 2012 and became the most watched video of all time on Youtube. What does the word "Gangnam" mean?
NASA scientists were "over the moon" in August 2012 when the huge robot, Curiosity, reached its destination. Which planet did it touch down?
What American superstar, who, for the last 10 or so years, has been in the spotlight mainly for her addiction problems and turbulent personal life, died the night before the prestigious Grammy awards?
Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner made history as the first man to break the speed of sound in a free-fall from over 35 km above Earth – don't try that at home! What soft drink company sponsored his jump?
Two Australian radio DJs faced public a backlash in December 2012 when their prank call turned into a tragedy. Who did they play a prank on?
One of the greatest cyclists of all time, Lance Armstrong fell from grace after accusations of doping and was consequently stripped of his Tour de France titles and banned from cycling for life. How many Tour de France competitions has he won?
The World didn't end on December 21 as some suspected. The calendar of which ancient civilization predicted the end of the world?
Who is Usain Bolt and why was he in the news in 2012?
The James Bond series celebrated its 50th anniversary with the release of the eagerly anticipated Skyfall starring Daniel Craig. How many actors have portrayed James Bond in the series?
UEFA promised to crack down on racism after allegations of racism in the Euro 2012 host nations. Which two Eastern European countries played host to the tournament?
A 15-year-old girl, Malala, from a remote village in north-west Pakistanwas shot in the head by the Taliban. The incident caused a public outcry in the country. Why was she targeted?
As if your life didn't revolve enough around Google products, Google unveiled Project Glass in April 2012 showing the world that the promised sci-fi future is here. What does the new product do?
Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic won the Australian Open final after a gruelling 5 hour 53 minute match, the longest Grand Slam final in tennis history. Who was his opponent?
Three members of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison sparking global protests from leading figures in the art world. What were they accused of?
2012 marked the 200th birthday of one of the most prolific British authors. Which one?

Happy New Year!

2012 news quiz - upper (with answers)

2012 news quiz lower (with answers)

2012 News quiz - Teachers notes

A Power Point version of the quiz thanks to Adele Raemer

Click here to download

Top 12 of 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:31:00 +0000

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.
There is, however, one difference. Seeing that it was really difficult for me to decide which posts are MY personal favourites, the list below, unlike that of Adam's, is a list of the most viewed posts of 2012.

1. In response to Hugh Dellar's Dissing Dogme: In Defence of… TBL

Hugh Dellar's anti Dogme series were enlightening and hugely entertaining but there was one particular argument which I didn't quite agree with and addressed in this post which has had the highest number of clicks this year. I don't know if it's down to an increased in interest in Task-Based Learning or because of the inclusion of a buzz word in the title (Dogme)

2. Highlighting lexical chunks with Diigo

I am happy that this entry was one of the most visited. And I am quite proud that I invented a new use for this social bookmarking tool. If you have a projector in class, do check it out. A bit teacher-centred but you can't have it all.

3. Two axis of word relationships

An attempt to introduce terms from linguistic semantics (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) into ELT although I've renamed them as horizontal and vertical word relationships.

4. Does digital mean better?

The word "technology", like grammar, is an instant magnet. Write a post about technology in education and – no matter which side of the debate you're on – lots of pageviews and comments are guaranteed.

5. Every Breath You Take

A classic activity for a classic song, which I've been using (for ages!) to introduce the concept of collocations - with students and teachers alike.

6. Teaching vocabulary out of context: conclusions

A wise man once said, "A blog is only as good as the comments it gets". In a desperate attempt to engage with my audience, I split this post into two, posing questions in the first part and providing conclusions in the second part. It seems to have worked.

7. Sloppy Brits or Uptight Americans?

Written in one go, this post garnered the highest number of comments (33) this year.

8. Spent but enriched

My venture into the world of online gaming (thanks to Graham Stanley) and a lexical activity that stemmed from it.

9. Honesty Day

Another song-based activity for the day that for some reason is celebrated only once year.

10. What is your favourite chunk?

What is the difference between a collocation and chunk? And what is your favorutie chunk? It's still not too late to take part in my mini-survey.

11. Before you listen here are some words you may now know

A personal story, interesting research findings and a useful (IMHO) template here, but stats on my blog show most visitors stumbled upon this post by googling: "a guy with headphones photo".

12. The principles of principled Eclecticism according to Chia Suan Chong

I've never written conference reports but this summary of the closing plenary at the annual TESOL France colloquium is an exception.

Cartoon by Dave Walker via We Blog Cartoons

Thinking of taking part in the TeachingEnglish blogathon and winning a trip to IATEFL (like Adam Simpson) or starting up your own blog? Based on the above list, here are some ideas for blog posts that are bound to guarantee success, exposure and lots of clicks.

12 blog post ideas for new bloggers

1. Write a response to someone (preferably famous) expressing your opinion
2. Write about a web tool or app you use
3. Take two pieces of jargon from another (even unrelated) field and apply them to ELT
4. Write something about technology (whether you're pro- or anti- doesn’t matter)
5. Blog about your favourite activity
6. Do a mini action research project in your class and post the results: preferably in two instalments
7. Rant
8. Write about something new you've learnt
9. There are many obscure "days" throughout the year: Honesty Day, Fun at Work Day, Dress-Up Your Pet Day and certainly loads of bad hair days. Pick one as a topic of your post.
10. Conduct a mini poll among your readers
11. Write an apology – even if you know the person it's addressed to is not going to read it
12. Summarise a conference talk / workshop / webinar you've enjoyed

Blogger's block?

Finally, if you have run out of ideas about what to blog, post a Top 5 or Top 10 list of your recent blog posts!

Thank you to all my readers and happy blogging to all new bloggers!

The Principles of Principled Eclecticism according to Chia Suan Chong

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 17:43:00 +0000

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^stannual 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.

From all translation to no translation

Her colourful account of different methodologies started from the Grammar Translation method. According to this oldest teaching method, used originally for teaching Greek and Latin, students memorised long lists of isolated words and grammar rules in order to translate passages into L1. No interaction or speaking in the target language was involved. Unlike the Grammar Translation, the Direct Method, which appeared in the early 20^th century, focused on oral communication. Based on the belief that students need to speak and hear the target language in order to learn it, teaching with the Direct Method consisted of short interactions between the teacher and student practising every day situations. No translation or interaction in L1 was allowed here. These "authentic" every day situations would often involve exchanges such as this:

Teacher: Have you two ears?
Student: Yes, I have two ears.

An outgrowth of the Direct Method was Audio Lingual Method (aka the Army Method), the essence of which Chia aptly demonstrated with this slide:

It was not clear to me at this stage why Chia kept referring to it as the Direct Method. Surely, the two have a lot in common, for example, the focus on correct pronunciation and grammatical accuracy and adherence to the target language. But Audiolingualism started much later - after WWII, mainly in the USA, and, as Chia acknowledged, was closely linked to Skinner's Behavourism. According to behaviourist psychology, learning occurs through a system of reinforcements through drilling and repetition or, to put it bluntly, "hitting students on the head until they get it right".

Not that the audience needed any comic relief – Chia kepts us engaged and entertained in equal measure throughout – but the humorous highlight of the presentation was the following video. See for yourself:

This is a true lexical approach, Chia claimed, tongue-in-cheek, because students are encouraged to memorise whole phrases and chunks. She then moved on to Noam Chomsky and his "device" – the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) that is. According to Chomsky, a human brain contains a LAD which allows us to make an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences, a hypothesis which regrettably gave further impetus to contrived grammar teaching.

After Chomsky came Krashen and I started to get the feeling that noone would escape unscathed tonight :) But I hope the irony of Chia's remarks was not lost on the audience. Chia merely highlighted shortcomings of various methods and theories and, at the same time, stressed how each and every one of them has something useful to offer. For example, translation is inevitable and often necessary. Try, for example, explaining the word "happen" without using translation!

Alternative approaches of the 1970s

Krashen was (indirectly?) responsible for Suggestopaedia, one of the alternative approaches which emerged in the 1970s after Audiolingualism was largely discredited. Suggestopaedia, later renamed - for some inexplicable reason - into Desuggestopaedia, is all about creating a relaxed state of mind in order to lower what Krashen referred to as the affective filter. To this end, Suggestopaedia makes use of classical music, comfortable furniture and colourful classrooms. Apart from Krashen's affective filter, this approach was not influenced by any particular theory of language and didn’t gain mass appeal. Another alternative approach of the 1970s was Total Physical Response (TPR), where the teacher gives a series of verbal commands and learners do the action (for example, jump or open the window). Apart from its obvious benefit for kinaesthetic learners and young learners, TPD is "more fun for the teacher than students", concluded Chia and moved on to another short-lived and probably the most left-field approach…

[Long pause]

The Silent Way

Unlike TPR, where teacher has all the fun, the Silent Way is a student-centred approach, in that it promotes interaction, teamwork, problem-solving and learner autonomy. The teacher guides students through a series of progressively more complex tasks, using gestures, visuals and Cuisenaire rods, while staying silent most of the time. Lastly, another humanistic approach, where the teacher takes a back seat, is Community Language Learning(CLL). CLL involves students sitting in a circle with the teacher standing outside and acting as a facilitator and "paraphraser". When a student decides to say something (s)he calls the teacher and whisper what they want to say, in their L1. The teacher whispers back the equivalent utterance in English which the student then repeats.

The above practices are often described as "designer" or guru-led methods as each one is associated with a particular person:

Method	Inventor	Useful link
Desuggestopaedia	Georgi Lozanov	An article on Onestopenglish
TPR	James Asher	An article on TeachingEnglish
The Silent Way	Caleb Gattegno	An article on Onestopenglish
CLL	Charles Curran	An article on TeachingEnglish with a lesson outline

All these methods were a subject of a recent #ELTchat and a comprehensive summary can be found on Rachael Roberts's blog – click here

CLT or getting it wrong all over again

In the final part of her fascinating talk Chia traced the origins of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT or Communicative Approach) to Vygotsky and his zone of proximal development (ZPD). ZPD in essence is the gap between the learner's current developmental level and what (s)he can achieve with educational support or in collaboration with more capable peers. This interesting connection was one of the many insights offered in Chia's talk

Sadly enough, Communicative Lang Teaching with its seemingly thematic syllabus, is, according to Chia, a traditional, linear grammar syllabus in disguise. Likewise, Krashen's comprehensible input (i+1) has been misinterpreted to cover only grammar input, and not lexis or features of discourse. The unfortunate result is careful sequencing of grammar items according to their perceived complexity – hardly an approach advocated by the fathers of the CLT such as Widdowson or Nunan. Chia talked favourably of the Task-Based Learning (TBL) as an approach focusing on meaningful communication and negotiation of meaning before summing up the main factors necessary for Second Language Acquisition: interaction, negotiation of meaning and engaging in meaningful tasks.

Eclecticism according to Chia (and me)

In conclusion, Chia stressed that principled eclecticism (I prefer the term "informed eclecticism") and "cherry picking" are even more important today because our students know more thanks to technology. This put me in mind of my Pecha Kucha at the ETAI 2011 conference entitled "On Eclecticism and Other Exotic Fruits" where I used similar metaphors. I talked about how an eclectic approach allows teachers to draw on aspects of a variety of methods and select what is appropriate to particular students in particular contexts. But teachers who adopt such an approach need to know the ingredientsof the diet they are offering their students.

Or, to use one of my favourite Henry Widdowson's quotes:

"If you say you are eclectic but cannot state the principles of your eclecticism, you are not eclectic, merely confused"

Chia Suan Chong is a teacher and teacher trainer with IH in London. She is an avid blogger (www.chiasuanchong.wordpress.com and www.eltknowledge.com) and a self-confessed conference junkie.

With Chia at TESOL France | Photo by Bethany Cagnol

Further reading

If you are interested in the evolution of language teaching methods, these two titles are particularly recommended:

Jack C. Richards and Theodore S. Rodgers. Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching: A Description and Analysis. CUP 2001

Diane Larsen-Freeman. Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching. OUP 2000

Explaining the difference between (near-) synonyms

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:44:00 +0000

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

Dear Renee,

First of all, it's great to know that you use concordance software. I wouldn't give pupils 10 collocations for each word as it is a bit overwhelming. In the early stages I would give them 3-4 common collocates and/or examples for each noun. I know it's generally difficult to put a finger on them but unfortunately with many near-synonyms the difference is purely collocational.

Photo by USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74)
on Flickr

According to www.just-the-word.com, the most frequent noun collocates of the adjective routine are check, maintenance, test and operation. Perhaps I wouldn't give operation at this stage but stick to the first three as they all have to do with checking something for no special reason - just because you have to do it. I think based on these collocates, a generalisation can be made as to how it's used. I'd say of the three adjectives, routine has the most restricted use as it goes only with a handful of nouns.

Photo by @sandymillin
via eltpics

For usual I would provide the following examples on the board:
It's ____er than usual
(October is warmer than usual this year)
As usual, he arrived late.
If you always meet your friend at the same you can say "let's meet at the usual time"

Intuitively, I thought usual is the most common of the three but according to this tool www.wordcount.org it turns out that regular is more common. Regular is used in:
on a regular basis
at regular intervals
regular customer
You also need regular exercise to stay healthy and fit
I am sure the students would also be familiar with the term regular verbs :)

(These examples are from the Longman Dictionary)

It's difficult to extrapolate a rule here but perhaps you can point out that we use regular when we talk about something that you do every week / every month - it has to do with time intervals.

I know students like the safety of cut-and-dried rules but unfortunately knowing the difference between near-synonyms is often simply knowing what goes with what. Likewise, in Hebrew there are also words that may seem identical to English speakers, for example different Hebrew words for picking fruit/vegetables. Ask learners to imagine they had to explain the difference to an English speaker and why one goes with olives and another verb with oranges. They'd be stuck. They would find that the difference between them is not their denotational meaning but rather how they are used, i.e what they go (=collocate) with. Does it help in any way?

Do you think my answer was helpful?

Postscript
My article Lexical Density in English in Modern English Teacher 2012, vol 21(1) addresses the issue of synonymy in more detail.
For more concordance tools and online dictionaries see Essential Lexical Tools on this blog.

Image credits
Both images are licensed under a Creative Commons Licence [CC-BY-NC-2.0]

Every Breath You Take

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 09:25:00 +0000

A classic collocation gap-fill activity

I don't why I haven't posted this earlier because this is my favourite song when it comes to introducing for the first time the idea of collocations to students and teachers alike. It is full of verb-noun collocations ranging from very common (take a step, play a game) to less frequent (stake a claim). Note that common collocations often involve delexicalised verbs (take, make etc) with wide collocational fields while less common ones usually involve more semantically charged words (stake) which collocate with a limited number of words (claim).

There are two versions in the handout below: the first version is the one I normally use with students, the second one is for teachers but can also be used with advanced students (C1/2).

The focus of the activity is not listening so with both versions the gap fill should be attempted before listening. To complete the gaps, students should draw on their lexical knowledge; some would probably know parts of the song by heart J

Version 1

You may have to clarify the following items:
stake a claim = say or show that you think something should be yours
break a vow = break a serious promise: make / take / break a vow
long for your embrace = want very much to hold you in my arms
fake a smile = pretend that you're smiling; also fake his own death, fake her signature

Version 2

In this version, all the missing words are verbs. No word bank is given. Ask students / teachers to complete as many gaps as they can before playing the song.

Every Breath You Take

A subtitled version of the music video can be found on MusicEnglish: http://musicenglish.co.uk/every-breath-you-take-by-the-police/

This activity always goes down well for me. Hope it works for you too.

Summer teaching (had me a blast)

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:18:00 +0000

Photo by Cleo Phas

August till about mid-October is the time of the year when I enjoy a bit of a lull at work and all my usual students (I teach small groups) are on holiday. It’s also the time of the year when I get approached by some really peculiar one-on-one students. For example, this year’s summer assortment includes the following characters:

an adult beginner who wants to speak perfect English by December and yet doesn’t want to do any out-of-class work;
a high-powered business woman who needs help with her presentations in English
an IELTS candidate who wants to practise speaking

You will say: what’s so unusual about it – isn’t it the kind of students we normally teach? Yet there is a difference. My usual, longer-term students are both familiar with my expectations of them and realistic about the process of language learning and therefore willing to work hard. In contrast, my August students are less process-oriented and, for most part, are looking for quick fixes. As a result, little of what happens in class can be considered as Language Teaching. It’s also ironic that I normally charge these short-term summer students higher fees – this way I can work fewer hours and spend more time on the Tel Aviv beach :)

Take, for example, student A who takes lessons twice a week but is unwilling to do anything outside class. I've tried a combination of paper-based and computer based homework but to no avail. He also refuses to take any notes in class relying on his memory. I got him to install Evernote so that he can take notes on his iPad in class and review on his computer at home or his iPhone on the go (see this post by Rob Lewis about using Evernote) but his enthusiasm didn’t last longer than a week by the end of which he'd forgotten his password. My recent attempt at mLearning was to ask him to take photos with his iPhone of anything he can find in English on the way to work – there's lots of signs in English in Tel Aviv such us "Room for rent", "Business lunch", "Dry cleaning" and many others. I thought it would both inspire him to learn English outside the class and maximise his exposure. But this was futile too.

Students B and C while seemingly more motivated aren't any better. Student B wants to "upgrade her English" but by the time we go over her presentations very little time is left for any language input. Besides she refuses to try out any new language I try to feed into her presentations relying on what she knows. She is a very busy woman but she reads a lot in English (mainly work-related stuff) so I suggested using Diigo to highlight useful chunks (I told her "steal useful expressions") in the articles she reads and trying to incorporate them into her presentations but she didn't see much point of it.

Finally, Student C is similar in that he wants us to practice speaking with me correcting his mistakes (which he makes again 10 minutes later) but he doesn't actually want to do anything else in English (listening, reading) believing that his speaking will somehow miraculously improve as a result of speaking. Thus we're stuck rehearsing ad nauseam IELTS speaking part 2 and 3 - he even brings his own topics!

One of my favourite quotes about teaching goes something like that:

One of the greatest roles of a teacher is making oneself unemployed

I am all for making myself unemployed (so that I can enjoy the beach) that’s why I see the development of learner autonomy as essential especially when dealing with short-term students. Apart from teaching a lot of lexis which I see as a key to language learning, I always try to encourage students to become independent learners, maximize their out-of-class exposure to and improve their uptake of English. Giving the learner necessary tools, developing their ability to "notice", raising awareness of patterns of language is more important than correcting a few random mistakes and teaching them a handful of useful phrases.

Photo by Tzvi Meller

Unfortunately my summer students seem to seek easy way out solutions at a higher than normal price which I shamelessly charge while being fully aware that I am not fulfilling my role. Consider me unethical but I indulge their unrealistic expectations because the customer is always right.
And the beach beckons…

Where's my beach towel?

Does digital mean better?

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 08:34:00 +0000

What should I do with these?
Photo by Tzvi Meller

I’ve always envied people who can whip up a blog post straight after returning from – or sometimes while still at - a conference. Although I didn’t write any IATEFL 2012 reflections there was one session that particularly resonated with me: Andrew Walkley’s Technology and principles in language learning. He talked about how trying to bring technology to our digitally native learners many teachers have lost the focus on language. He listed five things that he found particularly worrying about unprincipled integration of technology into ELT:

Vocabulary and grammar are seen as separate entities
Grammar domination
Vocabulary taught in sets
Activity overload
Skills are separated from language

Andrew seems to have taken the thoughts right out of my head – only I was afraid to verbalise them apart from this post where I lightly bemoaned the lack of web tools and apps focusing on the link between grammar and vocabulary, multi-word phrases and syntagmatic features of words. But, in all honesty, all the digital language learning materials I've seen tend fall into two categories: on the one hand, presentation of lots of individual words which, depending on the tool/app, are matched, flipped or shaken; on the other hand, exercises aimed at practicing sentence grammar, available in alarming abundance.

Same sh*t, new wrapping

Despite some very convincing evidence (Nation 2000, Tinkham 1993, Waring 1997) that presenting vocabulary in semantic sets (e.g. spoon – fork – knife) is counter productive, most online materials repeat the faults of the published ELT materials and organise vocabulary precisely in this fashion. When it comes to grammar teaching, digital resources also mimic the mistakes of many old-fashined grammar books overemphasising explicit rule teaching and sentence-level grammar.

I recently attended a webinar where - after waiting for quite a while for the presenter’s files to upload - we heard a talk about how technology can be used not only with young learners but with adult beginner learners. Great idea, I thought! While I do not wish to detract from the quality and clarity of the presentation itself which was very well organised I went to the websites mentioned by the speaker and checked out some of the recommended exercises. For example, this Past Simple matching exercise taken from the ESOL Courses website - click here

I’ve always avoided and discouraged my students from using grammar reference books that use unnatural examples to demonstrate a grammar point. Why would I switch badly written grammar books for badly written online exercises? I cannot imagine anyone responding to the question on the left with the answers on the right. In fact, the inclusion of unnatural longer responses I went shopping on Sunday instead of the more natural went shopping defeats the purpose of the exercise because most of these questions can be answered by matching days of the week rather than by attending to the Past Simple form (did you do; went) if that’s what the exercise purports to do.

Am I a luddite?

Far from it. I think I am fairly dexterous with computers and, like many, I’ve embraced technology in my daily life, personal and professional. I use social media to connect with teachers around the world, take part in weekly #ELTchat, show Youtube videos in class and play online games with my students. I’ve also read and quoted from Mark Warschauer, attended the Virtual Round Table and given learning technologies courses.

In fact, it’s a bit ironic that I am writing this because earlier this summer I helped organise an ETAI pre-conference event “Integrating technology into ELT” featuring Gavin Dudeney and later on coordinated and taught an advanced learning technologies summer school alongside the Queen of Ed Tech herself - Shelly Terrell. I am neither anti- nor pro- technology; I simply use technology and believe it can enhance learning. But unfortunately much of what I see under the guise of educational technology serves little educational purpose. The fundamental principles of language learning and teaching seem to evade many digital materials out there, whether online resources or mobile language learning apps. It also saddens me to see many bloggers pandering to the lure of Ed Tech and glorifying the use of cartoon makers and online poster designers over the genuine focus on language.

Photo by eltpics

All doom and gloom?

Not really. There are many web tools which can be used in the EFL classroom and help teachers and learners focus on language - see my collection here

Interestingly and sadly, when I was presenting these tools at the above-mentioned summer school - and the activities involved actually focusing on language - the more advanced, tech-savvy participants, who were very adept at creating photo slide shows or Glogster posters quickly lost interest and “switched off”. ‘Nuff said.

References

Nation, I.S.P. (2000) Learning vocabulary in lexical sets: dangers and guidelines. TESOL Journal 9 (2), 6-10. Available at
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul-nation/2000-Lexical-sets.pdf

Tinkham, T. (1993). The effect of semantic clustering on the learning of L2 vocabulary. System 21(3), 371-380

Waring, R. (1997). The negative effects of learning words in semantic sets: A replication. System 25, 261-274

Highlighting lexical chunks with Diigo

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 10:09:00 +0000

Image by photosteve101 on Flickr
www.planetofsuccess.com/blog

Diigo is a social bookmarking tool which allows you to save and access all your bookmarks online. But it's not only a great app for keeping your links in one place; its highlighting function can be used in class for drawing students attention to and keeping track of lexical chunks in online articles, texts and web pages.

You will need to be in a connected classroom (computer, projector, access to the Internet). After your students have read the article for meaning - and possibly discussed it - ask them to underline lexical chunks, collocations and other useful bits of language. Then display the text on the board and highlight the chunks with the whole class on the board using the Highlight function on Diigo:

For example, I recently used a BBC article about Cricket making an Olympic bid - click here
At this point I should say that I have no qualms about using what might be considered an outdated article, particularly if it has relevance to today or can be used to discuss how the situation described has changed or developed.

After highlighting all the useful lexical chunks in the text you click on Share, choose email and enter your students emails. If you tick Include notes, your students will not only get the link to the annotated version of the article but also all the lexical chunks you have highlighted in the body of your email.

To see the annotated article click here.

Now students can go over the language at home or be assigned between-class work. A group of politicians (upper-intermediate) I used this article with found that most of the highlighted chunks can also be used metaphorically to talk about politics. Here is a list of all the chunks we focused on:

still in the running
inaugural season
take on (smb)
preliminary discussions
making a case
further down the line
expressed initial interest
on track to
will take place at

Diigo has always been my tool of choice for saving bookmarks. But ever since I started using the Highlight function, it has earned its place in my collection of Essential lexical tools. And, in case you're wondering, Cricket is still not recognised as an Olympic sport.

>For ideas on how to work with lexical chunks extracted from texts, read my article Revisiting texts on the TeachingEnglish website - click here

Two axes of word relationships

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 19:17:00 +0000

Let's start with a warmer...

Which of these tasks or exercises do you normally see in coursebooks?

Look at the highlighted verbs in the text and match them with the following synonyms: investigate, find, catch, escape
Match the adjectives with their opposites, e.g. tall / short
Underline in the text all the expressions with OF
Group the words according to categories, e.g. vehicles: car, motorcycle; musical instruments: guitar, piano etc
Underline all the adverbs in the text. Now underline the verbs they go with.
Rick says "the journey was long and tiring". What other adjectives can be used to describe journeys?
Which is the odd word out? gaze - smile - stare - look

You probably answered 1, 2, 4 and 7 and to a lesser extent 3, 5 and 6

Now read on to find out why...

Words in a language can be described in terms of two types of relationships: paradigmatic and syntagmatic. A paradigmatic relationship refers to the relationship between words that are the same parts of speech and which can be substituted for each other in the same position within a given sentence. A syntagmatic relationship refers to the relationship a word has with other words that surround it. In the table below, paradigmatic relationships are shown vertically and syntagmatic relationship - horizontally:

	acquired
	purchased		costly		bicycle
	got		pricey	old	motorcycle
John	bought	a(n)	expensive	new	car

Click on the tab in the bottom right-hand corner to view in full screen

As you can see, the substitution of one word for another will not affect the syntax of the sentence.

Paradigmatic (vertical) axis

The words car, motorcycle and bicycle are related to each other because they all belong to the same semantic group: vehicles - a relationship known as hyponymy with a vehicle as a hypernym (a more general or superordinate word) and car, motorcycle and bike as hyponyms (more specific words, in this case types of vehicles). The other two kinds of paradigmatic relationship are those of synonymy (buy = purchase) and antonymy (new / old).

Seen like this, it may seem that any word in a language can be substituted for another. But as Corpus linguistics and Second Language Acquisition research have shown, language doesn't work in this slot-and-filler fashion and is not stored in the mental lexicon as a giant substitution table. Linear relationships with other words are equally important.

Syntagmatic (horizontal) axis
Unlike the paradigmatic relationships, the syntagmatic relationships of a word are not about meaning. They are about the lexical company the word keeps (collocation) and grammatical patterns in which it occurs (colligation).

Let's look again at the table / graph above where expensive can be substituted for pricey:

expensive new car

pricey new car

It seems to work, but you're unlikely to say "costly new car". Also old cannot be easily replaced by new as the combination expensive old is less likely than expensive new. In any case, the opposite of new in this case would probably be used or second-hand and not necessarily old. All these are collocational patterns. But there are also colligational preferences. For example, the words take in and deceive are in a paradigmatic relationship with each other, i.e. they are synonyms. However, take in has a tendency to occur in the passive:

He was taken in by her sob story
rather than "Her sob story took him in"

whereas deceive doesn't show such grammatical preference.

Wolter and Gylstad (2011), who studied the production of English collocations in L1 Swedish speakers of English, make an interesting observation that paradigmatic relationships tend to be similar across - even vastly different - languages whereas syntagmatic relationships are often arbitrary. For example, in English one goes on a diet, in Greek one “does diet” /'ka;neiß di;aita/, in French one “puts oneself on a diet” /sǝ metR o ReƷim/ and in Russian one “sits on a diet” /sest’ na di;'aitu/.

Therefore in ELT whereas students (and teachers) may derive great pleasure from such activities as putting words in categories (animals: dog, cat, turtle; transport: car, bus, bike) they would probably get more linguistic benefit if they - to put it simply - focused on drive a car and ride a bike, i.e horizontal / syntagmatic relationships.

John Sinclair (2004), the pioneer of corpus linguistics, contends:

the tradition of linguistic theory has been massively

biased in favour of the paradigmatic rather than the

syntagmatic dimension. (p. 140)

I believe, just like in linguistics, the paradigmatic dimension has been overemphasised in the ELT methodology. As you have seen from the warmer, vocabulary teaching in textbooks tends to focus mainly on paradigmatic relationships, e.g matching synonyms and antonyms, grouping words according to sets. However, collocations have also made their way into the mainstream teaching materials in the past 10 or so years.

I have provided some ideas (examples 3, 5 and 6 in the warmer) for focusing on syntagmatic relationships between words. Can you think of other activities and tasks that would highlight the syntagmatic dimension of vocabulary learning? Your ideas are welcome in the comments below.

References

Sinclair, J. M. (2004). Trust the text: Language, corpus and discourse. London and New York: Routledge.

Wolter, B. & Gyllstad, H. (2011). Collocational links in the L2 mental lexicon and the influence of L1 intralexical knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 32(4), 430-449

One word leads to ... or you've been primed!

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sat, 12 May 2012 16:54:00 +0000

Introducing students to the idea of lexical priming and a web tool called Netspeak

Photo by Tzvi Meller

In my previous post from the For the classroom category I shared a lesson idea which I developed for Honesty Day celebrated on 30 April (click here to see it). Apart from the song and discussion activities, students also read three articles from the Breaking News English website. To lead in to the articles I cut up the three headlines and asked my students to unjumble them, i.e. put the words in the right order. With hindsight I realised that I'd set up my students to fail as one of the headlines read:

Homeless man in credit card honesty

You often hear of credit card fraud (or perhaps credit card debt) but credit card honesty is an unlikely combination in a linguistic sense.

The ability to unjumble sentences is not only a matter of syntactic knowledge but also lexical competence. Hence it is much easier to unjumble sentences consisting of predictable word combinations or things that people would actually say. If you ask your students to unjumble a lexically impossible sentence or a headline based on word-play they will struggle with it.

Lexical priming
The "impossible" headline above prompted a discussion in class which led us into the idea of lexical priming. In psychology, priming refers to the effect previously presented stimuli have on your response to a later stimulus. The theory of lexical priming, put forward by Michael Hoey (2005), suggests that language users store the words in the context in which they have encountered them. Hoey argues that as a result of these multiple encounters we are primed to replicate these contexts in subsequent encounters, whether we read, listen, write or speak. For example, complete this phrase:

it never ceases to ___________

Of all the verbs that are semantically possible in the above sentence you probably chose amaze because you've been primed to reproduce what you've heard or seen many times before. Encountering a word repeatedly in particular ways makes you use it confidently and almost subconsciously in the same context.

Thus the theory not only accounts for why words are expected to be found in company of certain other words and occur in certain patterns but also provides a compelling explanation of fluency. Its everyday manifestation - a phenomenon which students will easily relate to - is in the ability to finish our interlocutors' sentences. Another common example is our ability to understand song lyrics even if the odd word is unintelligible here and there.

The theory (you can read more about it on this website) is also interesting as it solves the contentious native vs non-native speaker issue. Hoey effectively does away with the native / non-native dichotomy and instead puts them on a continuum. According to him, native speakers are also learners in that they continue being exposed to new primings throughout their lives. What makes them more advanced on the continuum is the sheer number of exposures they have had.

Netspeak
Netspeak - not to be confused with the way of speaking used to converse on the Internet - is an online tool which allows you to find any word in a search phrase or - in computational linguistics terms - perform a wild card query. It is particularly handy when you have doubts about how a phrase is formed or cannot find the right word. For example, this is what a search on it never ceases to ... returned:

You can click on the plus (+) to get sample sentences drawn from corpora.

What students can do with Netspeak:
Apart from checking the best way to complete a phrase, learners can do the following things using Netspeak:

Check for correct prepositions
For example, students are unsure whether they should say go for a trip or go on a trip. Enter in the search field

go ? a trip

It's particularly useful with those tricky dependent prepositions:

interested ...
fascinated ...

NB. Use a question mark (?) to find one word and multiple dots (...) to find any number of words.

Find a suitable adjective
For example, your Business English student is writing a cover letter to send with his CV. He can search for

I have ... experience

One of the top results will be "extensive"

I am sure there are many other ways you can use this tool in and if you have any more ideas, please share by leaving a comment below.

Priming activity for students
Here is a short activity I used with my students - feel free to use it (suitable for intermediate level and up). Make sure students compare their answers with each other before looking them up on Netspeak. You will see that in some cases they will end up with just one word (a result of a strong priming) while in others there will be a few possibilities.

One Word Leads To

References & further reading

Hoey, M. (2000). A World Beyond Collocation: New Perspectives on Vocabulary Teaching. In Lewis, M. (Ed.), Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach (pp. 224-243). Hove: Thomson-Heinle

Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical Priming: A new theory of words and language. London: Routledge.

If you happen to have a copy of the Macmillan English Dictionary, there is an article written by Michael Hoey in the Language Awareness section (LA12-13) for language learners in which he explains in a very accessible language the theory of lexical priming and how a good learners' dictionary can help students accelerate their priming.

In response to Hugh Dellar’s Dissing Dogme : In defence of… TBL

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:41:00 +0000

In the second installment of his thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable “Dissing Dogme” series (see here), Hugh Dellar addresses the touchy topic of language input in Dogme but this time Task-Based Learning (TBL) is also thrown in the mix. Why has TBL come under attack?

I enjoy reading Hugh Dellar’s posts, especially his latest anti-Dogme series which he pulls off with such ease and eloquence (and often withering sarcasm). For those who don’t know, Hugh Dellar is an advocate of the Lexical Approach and, together with Andrew Walkley, the co-author of Innovationsand Outcomes, the only EFL textbooks available on the market written from a lexical perspective (you can read my very favourable post about Innovations here)

I’ve always thought that TBL and Lexical Approach with their focus on meaning and the emphasis on use and exposure are close cousins. That’s why I was surprised to see that while pulling Dogme to pieces Hugh Dellar also talks disparagingly of TBL. In doing so, he draws on Anthony Bruton who has emerged in recent years as a sort of enfant terrible of ELT who has criticized practically everything: from TBL to the notion of World English (see ELT Journal 56/3 and 59/3 respectively) and – most recently CLIL (see his talks at last year’s and this year’s IATEFL conferences). But what surprised me was not Hugh’s reference to Anthony Bruton’s articles but his criticism of the absence of proactive language focus in TBL. Let’s have a closer look…

TBL model(s)

There is no definitive model for task-based instruction and various models proposed by Scrivener, Skehan and Willis are slightly different. However, what they all have in common is more or less the same three stage structure: pre-task, task and post-task.

The pre-task serves the same purpose as any other pre- (reading or listening) activity: it introduces the task – and this is one of Anthony Bruton’s issues with TBL: its similarity to skills based teaching. Note that this pre-stage can also include pre-teaching of some useful phrases and expressions which students may need later when performing the actual task.

A task itself can include a very wide range of activities – and that’s another thing Anthony Bruton seems to take issue with. For example, David and Jane Willis suggest that processes involving listing, sorting, matching, problem-solving, sharing personal experiences to name but a few can all qualify as tasks.

Photo by Aryanaslam [CC-BY-SA-3.0 ]
via Wikimedia Commons

In the following post-task feedback stage the teacher points out specific problematic language features which arose during the task stage, highlights useful language, draws students’ attention to the gaps between their interlanguage and the target equivalent – all these are often described as consciousness-raising (CR) activities. Now – and this is important - this stage can be followed up by a repetition of the task or doing a similar task in which students are given the opportunity to improve their performance.

Let’s apply this model to a lexical lesson…

_____________________________

Example 1: Describing a photograph.

Pre-intermediate level - teen / adult learners.

PRE-TASK: Show childhood photos of famous people / celebrities on the board to lead in to the topic. Ask students to guess who these people are.

TASK: In pairs / groups, students show each other their childhood photographs they have brought from home. They describe what is depicted in the photo and talk about that stage of their lives. Teacher monitors and notes down students’ errors as well as lexical deficiencies. Students then report to the rest of the class on any new or interesting things they have learned about their partners

POST-TASK: Students listen to a recording of a native speaker / competent language user describing his or her photo. Students then work with a transcript of the recording and analyse interesting linguistic features. These might include but not be limited to the following chunks:

Back then...

Before I came over here…

We used to… we would... and then we'd...

It was in the summer when I’d just + past participle

When I turned 13…

Teacher can also focus here on the mistakes students made, e.g. wrong past forms etc.

REPEAT TASK: students change partners and repeat the task incorporating (hopefully) the language dealt with in the previous stage OR students upload their photos to the class blog and write brief informal descriptions.

_____________________________

Example 2: Talking about a newspaper article.

Upper-intermediate level – a small group of Business English students

PRE-TASK: whole class watches 3 or 4 videos from Fox Business Brief http://video.foxbusiness.com (each one usually lasts under a minute) and discusses which news stories they find most interesting / relevant etc.

TASK: in pairs / groups, students talk about different news articles they read at home. Teacher monitors and notes down students' mistakes on slips of paper and discretely hands them to students. These may include:

*my article tells about…

*it’s deals with the problem of…

*I’m not agree with…

POST-TASK: live-listening. Students listen to the teacher talking about an article (s)he read. As they listen they note down useful chunks (in this case discourse markers) the teacher uses, such as

Basically what it talks about…

Photo by Lily Bar Am Kazado

Apparently…

The main point he’s making is

What really surprised me was…

Another interesting thing is..

One more thing I forgot to mention is…

Going back to what I was saying…

But that’s not the end of the story.

POST-TASK: Teacher elicits from students and boards the chunks they have written down

REPEAT TASK: Students talk about the news articles they have read in front of the whole class trying to incorporate the above chunks

For more on "live listening" see my article here or Ken Lackman’s article "Teacher as input"in ETp, Issue 48, Jan. 2007

_____________________________

Example 3: Creating an online poster as part of a school linking project with an English-speaking country. Pre-intermediate level – Young learners.

PRE-TASK: teacher and students discuss what information should be included into a biography poster and brainstorm the language they need. Useful patterns may include:

was born in… (place)

… was published in…

got married

won an award

is famous for his/her short stories / crime novels etc…

TASK: students work in groups to research the biography of a writer (from their country) they’ve chosen and create a poster using Glogster – this stage can be spread over a couple of lessons. Then they share their posters with other groups.

POST-TASK: students view the posters created by their English-speaking peers. Together with the teacher, they highlight useful chunks:

was born into a wealthy family (extension of wasborn in…learners are already familar with)

she went to school (learners may have produced she learnt at school)

went on to become…

Students incorporate appropriate changes in their Glogster posters before uploading them to a class wiki and sharing with the linked school.

_____________________________

TBL & Lexical Approach

As you can see there is room for both reactive and proactive language input as well as teacher-fronted language work within communicatively negotiated interaction in TBL. Moreover, Ellis (2003) stresses that in order to promote language acquisition tasks need to have a communicative as well as a linguistic focus.

Unfortunately I have not gathered from Anthony Bruton’s articles (which are soundly researched by the way) what his views on language are. Nor have I observed him teach. But the way I see it, the task cycle perfectly fits the lexical view of language and language teaching Hugh espouses - as do I since I’ve always considered him to be my mentor.

Unlike TBL, the Lexical approach is often criticized for the lack of clear instructional sequence (see, for example, this Scott Thornbury's article), which is perhaps the unfortunate reason why it has never been taken up by the mainstream ELT. Hence Hugh Dellar’s criticism of the paradigm perfectly compatible with and suitable for lexical teaching came as a surprise to me – unless I grossly misunderstand the TBL framework.

References & further reading

Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. OUP
Willis, D. & Willis, J. (2007). Doing task-based teaching. OUP
Willis, J. (1996). A framework for task-based learning. Longman
see also Willis' website: http://www.willis-elt.co.uk/
Scrivener, J. (2005). Learning teaching (2nd ed.). Macmillan

Honesty Day

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:48:00 +0000

April 30th is celebrated in the USA and some other countries as Honesty Day. To mark this day, Billy Joel's classic ballad was an obvious choice for my upper-intermediate students but then I also decided to develop some activities around it.

The activity outlined below is suitable for both teen and adult learners at Upper-Intermediate (B2) level and up

Outline

Step 1 - Discussion
Before the discussion you can brainstorm with your students examples of dishonesty (e.g. lying, cheating in an exam, stealing etc)

Step 2 - Situations
I found a quiz on the CBS website which I adapted for this activity. I was very tempted to use "What would you do?" to get the students to practise hypothetical modal would but "What do you do?" seemed more natural in the given context.

Step 3 - Song
Gapfill activities with songs can be a trite affair; however using them before listening is highly beneficial especially if you gap parts of a collocation or another common expression - and songs are a good source of these! For example, in the song at hand students should know the expressions "pretty lies", "wear your heart on your sleeve", "till the bitter end" as well as grammatical patterns "I can always find someone to say they..." - you can't put "concerned" here because there is no "are" etc. However the main focus of this activity is heightening students' phonological awareness as once they've figured out what completes a gap they can easily fill in the other gap with a rhyming word.

Honesty - handout and teachers notes

After listening to the song to check the answers (and a second time to sing along!) you can provoke further discussion by asking your students:

What is the difference between honesty and truthfulness? Or honesty and sincerity?

Other ideas

I found at least three articles related to the topic on Sean Banville's BreakingNewsEnglish site:

Homeless man in credit card honesty
Lonely Planet travel guide in fraud scandal
Cut-and-past essays a problem in schools

I hope your students enjoy the lesson. Happy Honesty Day!

If I were a boy

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:53:00 +0000

This activity based on Beyonce's song is suitable for older teens and adults at pre-intermediate level and up. The lesson plan is based on the listening activity template I blogged about earlier (click here). An Interactive WhiteBoard (IWB) is desirable but not essential.

IWB techniques

Two IWB techniques are used here: in the pre- and post-listening stages of the lesson.

Drag-and-Drop
Display the If I were... activity on IWB and elicit from students which statement should go in which column (Boys' answers / Girls' answers). Drag them to the appropriate columns or get one of your students to do it. There might be some confusion here as the statements should not correspond with what they do but with what they would do (if they were boys/girls). This later can be exploited to focus on the hypothetical nature of would.

Erase-and-Reveal

Colour over the answers on IWB page 3 with the white ink. Then reveal one by one as you go through the answers with the class.

The rest of the procedure is outlined in the template below

Download
IF I WERE A BOY Drag'n'Drop -for Promethean ActivInspire IWB
If the file is not compatible with your IWB software, create your own - see IWB page 2 below

COMPUTER-BASED WORKSHEET - if students are working in a computer room. Split it into separate files/pages if you don't trust your students to do the first page without looking at the lyrics on page 2.
There is also a paper-based worksheet that comes with the template below.

Song Template Beyonce_If I Were a Boy

Before you listen, here are some words you may not know

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:54:00 +0000

Pre-listening activities: what to focus on?

At last year's IATEFL conference in Brighton I was at a presentation on teaching listening where I got into a bit of an argument with the speaker. I don't know if it was my nerves before my own, first presentation at IATEFL but my behaviour wasn't the best and I've regretted ever since. The whole situation was rather ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was the fact that in principle I agreed with the presenter who argued that there is little benefit in pre-teaching vocabulary before listening activities - I wouldn't agree though with his claim the word "prowl", one my favourite words in English, is useless :)

There is an interesting piece of research to substantiate the speaker's argument, which he surprisingly did not mention. Chang and Read (2006) administered a listening comprehension test to160 students who were divided into four groups and received a different kind of support:

1. Providing background information on the topic (in L1)

2. Repetition of the input

3. Previewing the test questions

4. Vocabulary instruction

Which one do you think was most beneficial to the learners?

The order these four types of support are listed above actually represents their effectiveness according to Chang and Read's findings. Providing topical knowledge ranked as the most useful while pre-learning vocabulary was consistently the least useful form of support across all levels of proficiency.

Are you surprised by the results?

If you're an English speaker teaching in a non-English speaking country, try setting up your own experiment in your classroom: play a recording or podcast based on a highly local news story about the upcoming elections or some such with lots of names of various politicians. Don't be surprised if your students - say from intermediate level and up - understand more than you do. I’ve tried it and I stand by the assertion that topic familiarity is much more important than glossing a few isolated vocabulary items. The reason is that a lot of listening occurs... before listening. What students would therefore benefit from is pre-task activities which aim to:

activate a topic-related schema (general knowledge about the related domain)

awaken their background knowledge (what they already know)

arouse their curiosity about and interest in the topic through various prediction tasks

So should we banish the practice of vocabulary pre-teaching activities altogether? Certainly not. There are other studies which showed that pre-learning low frequency vocabulary (e.g. prowl) has a (relative) value. For example, Webb (2009) found that it helped learners improve their comprehension when watching TV programmes, particularly if students have already mastered the most frequent 3000 words in English.

Most importantly, teachers rarely teach vocabulary for the sake of teaching vocabulary - although it is perfectly justified - most vocabulary teaching takes place within listening and reading activities. If we do away with pre-tasks focusing on vocabulary, when would you teach vocabulary? So as long as you have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, vocabulary instruction before listening is clearly warranted.

The template below, which I developed for teachers I was mentoring a few year ago, includes various pre-task ideas including both content-related support and vocabulary instruction.

On a personal note, I’d better look out for the speaker I unintentionally upset last year and apologise to him – the IATEFL 2012 conference starts today!

Listening Activity Template

For an example of this template applied to a song, click here

References

Chang, A. C-S., & Read, J. (2006). The effects of listening support on the listening performance of EFL learners. TESOL Quarterly, 40(2), pp 375-397

Webb, S. (2009). Pre-learning low-frequency vocabulary in second language TV programmes. Language Teaching Research, 14(4), pp 501-515

Image credit
Lost in the Music by Vox Efx (licensed under CC-BY-2.0)

Sloppy Brits or uptight Americans?

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 09:02:00 +0000

Who is sloppier when it comes to grammar or should we all just get over it?

A recent discussion on a teachers’ forum has made me wonder amusingly and bemusedly again about correctness, prescriptive grammar rules and how English teachers just LOVE grammar and arguing about it - I wish lexis would prompt such heated debates, for example what verb should go with knowledge: gain or acquire? or some such.

Among the comments about pointlessness of teaching grammar to students - why bother if native speakers make mistakes - the one that stuck with me was an amusing remark made by my friend, colleague and former co-mentor Adele who often comes by this blog (Adele, are you reading?). She wrote:

[…] It took me a while after marrying a Brit, to get used to

the poor grammar prevalent in the UK even among many educated people.

Adele

Interesting thought… Recently I was coordinating Jeremy Harmer’s visit to

Israel

. As part of his programme, he was scheduled to appear as a keynote speaker at the annual study day organised by the Forum for College English Department Heads with his talk in which he (midly) criticizes Dogme. The talk originally entitled:

Teaching Unplugged Beats Acquisition? What to Teach to Who, with What and Why

caused a bit of an uproar when I announced it at a monthly meeting of the English Forum. The English Forum (quite a few of them Israelis of American origin) found the title ungrammatical, bemoaned falling grammar standards and stopped short of accusing Jeremy Harmer of not knowing English. The title was thus changed to:

Teaching Unplugged Beats Acquisition? What to Teach to Whom, with What and Why

This also reminded me of another incident when a North American friend of mine and I were at the closing gala of the British Film Festival a few years ago where the former deputy director of the British Council in Israel said something like “we would like to thank people who we worked with”. My friend launched into a long tirade about how she should have said “people with whom we worked” and didn’t shut up until the speeches were over and the screening started.

So is it really Brits who have poor grammar or Americans who can sometimes be sticklers for somewhat outdated prescriptive rules?

While I was writing this, the above cited message prompted the following response:

Americans are no better with overuse of the present progressive,

confusion of adverbs and adjectives and eliminaton of perfect tenses.

Just listen to President Barak O' Bama speak freely (not from a

pre-written speech) and you hear every mistake listed above.

Francine

Diachonic corpus analysis (that’s when you compare lots of written and oral texts from today with those of the past) indeed shows that the present progressive is becoming more common which is manifested in such utterances as:

I’m hating my job

You’re looking good.

and often quoted:

I’m lovin’ it.

(but let’s be honest, have you heard anyone actually use it except for Justin Timberlake in his song which was eagerly adopted by McDonalds?)

In all of the above sentences stative verbs are used in the continuous / progressive form (pace Raymond Murphy) which was not common, say, 50 years ago.

As regards the issue of adverbs and adjectives, the “confusion” can be exemplified by:

He was driving real slow vs He was driving really slowly

Then again, Americans may be using the former more often but aren’t all these examples of spoken language which does not always abide by the prescriptive rules of traditional grammar? For generations of teachers and learners raised on Murphy’s grammar it might indeed be difficult to embrace the view that language is a constantly evolving organism whose norms are inevitably changing. As a result, infinitives become split and nouns become verbs (e.g. Facebooking and googling) and subjects and verbs – this one does not cease to shock me – do not always seem to be in agreement (Windows IS shutting down).

In contrast to Murphy, Carter and McCarthy’s Cambridge Grammar of English (CUP 2006), for example, offer a much more descriptive view of the English grammar based on real every day usage with whole sections devoted to the grammar of spoken English. In my earlier post Spoken Grammar I talked about the grammar of spoken English being distinctly different from the written grammar and suggested activities that can be used to highlight the features of Spoken Grammar in class.

So what do you think?

Do you also find that the British are sloppier when it comes to grammar?
Should teachers just get off their high horses and stop arguing about the prescriptive grammatical rules?
Or do you think without these debates our profession would not be as interesting?

P.S. Oh and if you’re still interested – and I trust you are since you’ve come by this blog – both “acquire” and “gain” mentioned above collocate with “knowledge”, albeit “acquire” is more common according to both Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC)

What is your favourite chunk?

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:46:00 +0000

Blog visitors poll

Leoxicon is about to clock up ten thousand visitors and I thought I should do something to celebrate this achievement. At first I thought I'd revamp the look of my blog but you need time for that and there is not much you can do on Blogger until they improve their Dynamic Views templates. Then I thought since this blog is all about collocations and lexical chunks I should add a nice little widget somewhere on the right displaying a new chunk every day. But my internet search for "a phrase of the day" or "an expression of the day" widget drew a blank. It's funny that despite all the evidence and research, whether cognitive or psycholinguistic, pointing to the phrasal nature of the lexicon, i.e. words are remembered, stored and retrieved in chunks, all the EFL teaching materials are still preoccupied with words, words, single words. The integration of web technologies doesn't seem to have helped either. Having said that, I've stumbled upon two interesting websites:

Phrase Mix posts a new colloquial phrase every day and Tweet Speak English - every week or so. Both come with audio and accompanying activities but unfortunately not all the content is available for non-members.

Since my search for a lexical gadget has proved futile, I decided to open it up to you, my readers, and ask you to post your favourite chunks. But first of all, what's the difference between a collocation and a chunk?

Collocation is a combination of words that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. This definition is rather wide but most collocations fall into the following categories:

Verb+Noun: achieve a goal
Adj+Noun: reckless driving
Noun+Noun: a chance encounter
Verb+Adv: talk freely
Adv+Adj: ridiculously expensive
Noun+Verb: the bomb went off

Even though they statistically occur together very often, most methodologists agree that the following combinations are not considered collocations:

Multi-part/phrasal verb: look after
Adj+dependent preposition: afraid of
Incomplete fixed phrase: sort of

All other multi-word phrases, which are not readily identifiable as collocations, can be considered chunks: See you later (formulaic expression), Come to think of it...(discourse marker), a few years ago (prepositional phrase), If I were you... (sentence head), The more... the better (sentence frame) and many others.

So what is your favourite chunk to teach or simply the one that you find yourself using a lot? Please post your chunks in the comments below.

Teaching vocabulary out of context: conclusions

noreply@blogger.com (Leo) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:53:00 +0000

This follows on my earlier post Teaching vocabulary out of context: is it worth the time?

About a month ago I blogged about my mini action research on decontextualised vocabulary learning. The post generated some discussion with some people arguing that there was nothing decontexualised about it - you can read the original post and the comments here. The main finding was that on the post-test there was no difference between the items which were learnt out of context and the items presented in class in context. So is decontextualised vocabulary teaching a justified strategy?

Obvious benefits

Even though the decontextualised “Go home and look up” activity produced mixed results and there was a lot of reteaching involved, I still consider it to be successful. Besides enriching their vocabulary it gives learners a sense of autonomy as well as responsibility for their learning, not to mention practice with using dictionaries, an often overlooked skill in ELT. I will definitely keep giving my students such tasks it in the future.

The fact there was no significant difference between the explicitly taught and independently learnt items on the test attests to the fact that an initial encounter (whether contextualised or decontextualised) is not as important as subsequent elaboration on aspects of a word meaning, repeated encounters with the item, rehearsal and recycling. The research seems to corroborate it (see for example Hulstijn 2001).

Ifs, buts and qualifications

Decontextualised vocabulary learning was frowned upon in the communicative teaching tradition.However, recent years have seen its resurgence due to the emerging evidence that this type of learning is legitimate for studying the basic vocabulary quickly (see Laufer 2009). Note that Laufer uses the word “basic”. In other words, in order to get to some threshold level, learners need to quickly acquire a large number of words, and decontextualised learning is a perfectly justified strategy. But when it comes to post-intermediate learners, I would only use decontextualised learning of discrete items if learners:

1) are trained to look up words in a monolingual dictionary, carefully studying the provided examples and patterns of use;

2) have a subsequent opportunity to contextualise with the teacher providing guidance and corrective feedback;

3) are given ample opportunities for recall and recycling (as with any vocabulary learning)

Another issue which has been recently raised in the literature on vocabulary acquisition is the question of effectiveness vs. efficiency of a vocabulary task, i.e. how effective a vocabulary task is in terms of the time spent on it. Coming from this perspective, independent decontextualised learning for post-intermediate learners does not seem to be time efficient because a lot of time has to be spent on remedying learners’ problems and re-teaching mislearnt items

References

Hulstijn, J. H. (2001). Intentional and incidental second language vocabulary learning: A reappraisal of elaboration, rehearsal and automaticity. In Robinson, P. (ed.), Cognition and second language instruction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 258−286.

Laufer, B (2009). Research timeline: Second language vocabulary acquisition from language input and from form-focused activities. In Language Teaching, 42(3), 341-354.