Interesting recent research according to Penny Ur - Pt. 2

 Penny Ur shares research she finds interesting at IATEFL 2023

Penny Ur posting for photos with fans
after her IATEFL talk (19.4.23)

This is the second instalment of my two-part post about Penny Ur’s session at IATEFL matter-of-factly entitled Interesting recent research, in which, in a span of 30 minutes, I learned more than during the rest of the conference. 

Click HERE for the first part.

The reason why it’s taken me so long to publish this (IATEFL took place in April) is that it’s not merely a summary of the talk. Upon my return I did some digging into the sources Penny Ur cited; the result is a summary combined with some personal reflections. By her own admission, she whizzed through so many studies in the talk that I only focus on those that are interesting to me.

In context or with co-text?

Photo by @Mr_Schenk via eltpics

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

achieve

or

score

Explaining the difference between (near-) synonyms

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

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

Teaching vocabulary out of context: conclusions

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?