News Quiz 2023

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

Image by Fulton County Sheriff's Office,
State of Georgia via Wikipedia [Fair Use]

It's time for... News Quiz 2023! Following the annual tradition since the start of this blog, here comes the news quiz some of you have been waiting for.

As in the past three editions, the quiz uses a multiple choice format. This way you can get through the questions quickly and devote more time to discussing the stories and learning some language. As usual, the text is packed with very common lexical chunks (verified with the help of COCA) and other vocabulary items for your students to learn, practise and use. Some of these, such as made headlines, cause controversy and went viral (all from the Intermediate version), make recurring appearances in my news quizzes.

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.

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".

Zoom activity: Photos of the week

Photos of the Week section in The Atlantic

Although the lockdown restrictions are gradually being eased in many countries, remote teaching is still in effect - and looks set to continue for the unforeseeable future. Here is an activity I’ve been using a lot at the beginning of my Zoom lessons lately. I suppose you can call it a warmer.

One is better than none

One of my students showed her vocabulary (and grammar) notebook to her private tutor, who was surprised at the way new vocabulary was recorded in it. The student then conveyed the tutor's concerns to me, for example, that "pack in" doesn't have to go necessarily with the job (I'd taught the group "she's packed in her job"). She said, "it means 'finish' or 'give up'". I agreed. But where does it get you? If "pack in" can be substituted for "finish" or one of the other alleged synonyms (alleged because no two or more words are ever absolute synonyms - see HERE), can we say "I've packed in my homework"?

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.

News quiz 2015 - Follow up

Activities for reviewing lexis from News Quiz 2015

Photo by Dustpuppy72 via Flickr 

[CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Here's the promised follow up to the end-of-year news quiz: five pages of lexis-focused activities aimed at reviewing and consolidating language from the quiz. If you haven't seen the news quiz, click HERE.

You can preview the activities below or download them in Word format and edit/adapt them as you wish. The key (answers) follows below.

Update: Vocabulary from the quiz on Quizlet: https://quizlet.com/_1x0vbs

10 things you can do with "10 things you didn't know last week"

10 things you didn't know last week is a digest of news snippets published every Friday on the BBC website. You can find it in a section called Magazine Monitor. The items chosen for inclusion tend be offbeat and quirky news - very often to do with science. Each story is linked to its source - on the BBC website or elsewhere on the web.

Below are some ideas on how you can use 10 things you didn't know in class. You will see that all of them require no preparation on the part of the teacher.

The return of translation: opportunities and pitfalls

For most of the 20th century, there was a deep-rooted tradition in the ELT, which dates back to the Direct Method, that L1 in the classroom should be avoided at all costs. Although there were some alternative methods, such as Community Language learning (aka ‘counsel-learning’) and Dodson’s Bilingual Method, which made use of the learners’ L1 and used translation, most ELT methods of the last century were clearly ‘target-language’ only and some even went as far as to take a clearly anti-L1 stance in order to avoid interference.

A matter of semantics: same concepts, different divisions

Eighteen containers in assorted shapes and sizes on display in the corner of the room.

Fourteen EFL teachers organized in small groups according to their L1: English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, French.

Aim: categorise the objects; discussion in the group should be held in your L1

Purpose: to show that the same objects will fall into different categories depending on the language you use to categorise them. 

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.

Not a word was spoken (but many were learned)

Video is often used in the EFL classroom for listening comprehension activities, facilitating discussions and, of course, language work. But how can you exploit silent films without any language in them? Since developing learners' linguistic resources should be our primary goal (well, at least the blogger behind the blog thinks so), here are four suggestions on how language (grammar and vocabulary) can be generated from silent clips.

Experimental vocabulary practice

Image by Peter Megyeri
on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

My interest in experimental practice was piqued at the TESOL France’s last annual colloquium where I attended interesting sessions on the topic by Mike Harrison, and Christina Rebuffet-Broadus and Jennie Wright (see my conference report HERE)

For those who have done the DELTA, experimental practice may be associated with trying out different, non-mainstream teaching methods or approaches, such as TPR or the Silent Way. But, as Christina Rebuffet-Broadus, co-author of Experimental Practice in ELT: Walk on the Wild Side which recently came out on the Round, assured me during a brief chat we had after her workshop at TESOL France, experimental practice can also be conducted on a micro-level.

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.

End-of-year news quiz 2013

Traditional quiz for your first lesson in 2014

By lasanta.com.ec via Flickr
[CC BY 2.0]

For some reason I had a hard time coming up with news items for this year's quiz. Not that the year was uneventful but somehow there were no sex scandals, jumps from space or viral videos which usually make good questions for the quiz. There were lots of deaths though, which is reflected in the questions, and while we're on the topic I'd like to mention that our field has also lost three notable figures in 2013: Leo Van Lier, Earl Stevick and Dave Willis (see my tribute HERE)

Top 3 web tools of 2013

As the year draws to a close it’s time for various top 10, 20 etc lists. I am going to limit myself to 3 and share the web tools that have undoubtedly been my favourite this year. Three different tools - three different uses.

Love Actually: activities, ideas, vocabulary

Image source:
www.universalstudiosentertainment.com

I use a lot of films in my teaching: not just occasional Youtube clips but full-length authentic feature films, and I’ve been wanting for a while to start a new section on this blog where I would upload my film-based materials. I thought December would be a suitable time to share materials for many people’s favourite Christmas film Love Actually.
Warning: some scenes are suitable for adults only

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.

Lettuce, olives and other things

By @eannegrenoble | eltpics on Flickr

In the middle of the market where I go for my weekly vegetable shopping there is a stall where I buy olives. The owners of the stall are a husband and wife team who know I am an English teacher. The other day the wife – let's call her Lily – pointed at lettuce and asked me:

"What do you call it in English?" (the exchange took place in Hebrew)

"Lettuce," I replied.

"Letters?" asked Lily.

We then worked on the pronunciation a little until she got it right. I thought it was time to move on to new items. I pointed at olives.

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.