The state of stative verbs

or why I've stopped teaching them (and why you shouldn't bother with them either)

Photo by Emma Newman Segev
via ELTpics on Flickr

Like for many EFL/ESL teachers, stative verbs used to be a staple of my teaching menu. I had a great activity for focusing on them, which I have abandoned because I've come to realise that it served no purpose.

Powerful tea and other (im)possible collocations

Photo by Christina Martidou
via ELTpics on Flickr

How do you explain the notion of collocation to your students? Apart from using this great song, I often employ this simple technique: I write on the board: make and do (in the left column), homework and a mistake (in the right) and ask students to match.

On (and off) the wall vocabulary activities

I often make students (and teachers I work with) get out of their seats. I think movement in the classroom is important whether you believe in the now hotly debated concept of learning styles or because cognition is embodied. Apart from onion ring debates and mingling activities, there are many movement activities you can do using classroom walls.

To confer or to concur?

Image by @sandymillin
via eltpics on Flickr

For the first time since it was last held in Harrogate (2010), I didn’t go to the annual IATEFL conference this year and - like thousands of other English teachers who couldn’t afford to go to the largest EFL conference in the world - settled in comfortably in front of my computer to watch it online. All plenary talks and selected presentations are streamed live on the IATEFL online website thanks to the partnership between IATEFL and the British Council. I was particularly looking forward to the talks by Prof Michael Hoey on 4 April ("Old approaches, new perspectives" - click HERE to watch the recording) and Prof Sugata Mitra on 5 April ("The future of learning"- click HERE for the recording) and highly recommended them to all my students (teacher candidates).

We are lexically indebted to him

Image source:
www.willis-elt.co.uk

I opened my Facebook yesterday morning and was saddened to see Chia Suan Chong’s post about the passing of Dave Willis. I went over to Twitter and the feed was already filled with RIPs and condolences. For most in the ELT world Dave Willis’s name is associated with Task-Based Learning. But his contribution to lexical approaches to language teaching is just as outstanding. In fact, his pioneering work on the first Lexical Syllabus predates Michael Lewis’s seminal book by three years, the main difference between the two being words as a starting point for Willis and collocations for Lewis.

What corpora HAVE done for us

Sinclair's seminal work -
the bible of corpus linguistics

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

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