News Quiz 2022: follow up

Activities for reviewing and recycling the language from News Quiz 2022

Image credits: Matt Hrkac [CC BY 2.0];
Heo Manjin | Korea.net [CC BY-SA 2.0];
Number 10 [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0];
Steve Jurvetson [CC BY 2.0]

 I hope the latest edition of the News Quiz provided some learning opportunities for your students and you're ready to do some further language-focused work.

Like in the past two (pandemic) years, the follow-up activities come in different formats. Below you will find drag'n'drop activities on LearningApps, one matching activity on WordWall (Intermediate level only) and 'traditional' worksheets in editable Google Docs. As a lead-in, you can show this BBC News video and ask students which stories mentioned in the video appeared in the News Quiz.

What I saw in the war

 A lesson based on Janine di Giovanni's TED talk

Image source: TED.com [Fair use]

I came across this talk, which is shorter than usual TED talks, while looking for some materials on the topic of war and conflict - in view of the current events. The reactions from the students I've showed it to this week have been: "touching", "impressive" and "outstanding".

News Quiz 2021

Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash

This blog is alive! And so is the blogger. Yes, as you can see, I've survived the apocalypse and am proud to present the 2021 edition of the traditional News Quiz.

Unlike the previous year, the news stories related to coronavirus (oops, COVID-19) are kept to a minimum. But just like last year, the quiz is available in three formats: Google Slides, Quizizz and a

PDF / editable Google Docs.

News Quiz 2019 - Follow Up

Image credits: Frankie Fouganthin; Milliped; SounderBruce;
under Creative Commons license [CC BY-SA 4.0]

Activities for reviewing lexis from News Quiz 2019

Some of my followers have already been asking me for follow-up activities, particularly Quizlet sets, for the traditional end-of-year news quiz, which I posted last week. Incidentally, it was the 10th News Quiz I'd posted here, on my blog (you can see all of them HERE), since I first launched the blog at the end of 2010...  by posting News Quiz 2010. So, how's that for a #10yearchallenge? I'm actually surprised I've kept at it for so long!

News Quiz 2019

Traditional end-of-year news quiz for the first lesson of the new year

Photo by Katherine Cheng
[CC BY-ND 2.0] via Flickr 

Just as I finished working on this, a thought crossed my mind: perhaps it should have been an end-of-decade news quiz this time? Ah well... Anyhow, in keeping with the tradition, here's an end-of-year quiz based on the hottest news stories of the past year.

It's a usual mix of politics, sports and entertainment - but no mention of Brexit whatsoever!

And as usual, it's packed with lots of lexical chunks and other vocabulary items for your students to explore.

Present Simple or Hard Present ?

'The sun rises in the east' -
a commonly used example of the Present Simple
Photo by @CliveSir via ELTpics on Flickr

In a recent discussion in one of the Facebook groups (this is what seems to prompt my occasional posts these days), the Present Simple was referred to as 'one of the hardest tenses for students to get'. This made me wonder whether the Present Simple, contrary to what its name suggests, is indeed not so simple, or it is just another one of those teacher-induced neuroses. Let's see why there's so much ado about the most common, unmarked English tense.

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.

The double life of the asterisk sign

A small glyph with lots of functions

An article in TIME magazine entitled The History of #—and 6 Other Symbols that Rule Twitter and the Web (published 4 years ago, but which I came across this year) talks about how various little known or underused punctuation symbols have gained more prominence after being adopted in computing and, more recently, on social media. We learn that the at sign, @, was given a new lease of life in 1971, thanks to the creation of email, and the hash/pound sign, #, the formal name of which is octothorpe, was rehabilitated thanks to Twitter.

Be like Bill for grammar (and vocabulary) practice

The third person singular of the Present Simple tense is known to be particularly problematic for learners and when the "Be Like Bill" meme took social media by storm last week, I thought that it presents a wonderful opportunity to practise the problematic structure.

Background

If you don't know Be Like Bill, it works something like this: you see in your feed an image one of your Facebook friends has posted which looks like this.

Closely connected

Photo by Sudhamshu Hebbar on Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

An article written by the British linguist Vyvyan Evans entitled “Language Instinct is a Myth” which I shared on Twitter the other day triggered a lively discussion with my colleagues. One of the questions raised on Twitter was how come the idea that we are born with a built-in language capacity (aka the innateness hypothesis) has prevailed for so long and Chomsky, its main promoter, is part of all Master's in TESOL programmes if the theory has largely been discredited (Scott Thornbury asks the same question on his in X is for X-bar Theory).

News Quiz 2013 - Vocabulary

Images by Tim Evanson,  Gene Hunt
& Alex Alishevskikh via Flickr

As usual, as a follow up to the traditional end-of-year news quiz, here are language-focused activities aimed at reviewing and consolidating lexis from quiz. If you haven't seen the news quiz 2013, click HERE

This is how I usually use the quiz with my students.

Please note the quiz and the activities below come in two levels.

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.

The highway to fluency and a roundabout way to grammar

Photo by @GoldsteinBen via eltpics on Flickr

A second lesson with two new pre-intermediate (A2) students (I usually put my private students in pairs). In the first lesson we read three stories about immigrants (from Innovations Pre-Intermediate) and underlined useful bits of language (I hadn't introduced the word "chunk" yet). For our second lesson they were asked to prepare a short talk about their lives using as much "useful language" as they could – no writing! They did a pretty good job and successfully integrated some chunks into their stories:

Back home…

When I came over here…

I didn't have enough money

To support my family

It doesn't matter

Photo by Victoria Boobyer
via eltpics 

Do your students often say "it's depend..." or things like "it's not cost much..."? Do you think they need more grammar review and practice? Hardly. Perhaps you should draw their attention to the most common expressions that follow these patterns.

This exercise, inspired by Dave Willis, draws students' attention to common expressions with: it _____s and it doesn't ______. Suitable for Pre-intermediate students and up. Correct answers on the second page.

SLA research: still in the shackles of traditional grammar?

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

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

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

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".

Grammar rules... again?! Chunks strike back

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

Language or maths?

Spaarnestad Photo via  Nationaal Archief

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

News quiz 2012 - vocabulary review

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

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

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

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

Traditional end-of-year news quiz 2012

Photo by Sandy Millin via eltpics

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

Does digital mean better?

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: