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.

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.

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.

Learners' use of collocations: insights from the research 2

"Perform surgery" or "carry out surgery"?
Photo by Austin Samaritans via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.O]

What kind of collocations are most mistake-prone:
strong (e.g. honk the horn, shrug shoulders), medium-strong (e.g. wage a war, fail a test), medium-weak (e.g. perform an experiment, reach a compromise) or weak (e.g. see a film, read the newspaper)?

Learners' use of collocations: insights from the research

By jjpacres via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

I often cite research in my talks so in this series of posts I would like to share some interesting studies which looked at how second language (L2) learners use collocations. This post reviews three studies which sought to answer, among others, the following questions:

1. At what level of proficiency are learners more likely to make collocational errors? 

2. To what extent are learner’s errors caused by negative transfer (aka interference) from L1?

A thank you letter from students

One of the pleasures of teaching lexically is when you see your students starting to incorporate into their speech and writing lexical chunks studied in class - albeit not always appropriately. Here is a thank you letter I recently received from my students at the end of a course.

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.