Honouring Penny Ur, OBE

Penny Ur was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) for services to English Language Teaching earlier this year and as my last gig for the British Council I organised an event in her honour at the annual summer ETAI conference in Jerusalem. Knowing that events of this kind can easily slide into a sentimental outpouring of endless congratulations and knowing that Penny is not the kind of person who would like that, we were keen to keep it professional, elegant and "not too gooey" (Amanda Caplan, personal communication, 22 March 2013).

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.

Baku: beautiful but undiscovered (repost)

Having recently returned from another summer school in Baku, Azerbaijan I reproduce here an article originally written for the British Council blog last year.

After travelling to Georgia and Armenia on short-term teacher training missions last year I was looking forward to my visit to the third country of the Caucasian triangle: Azerbaijan. I’d heard that Baku, the capital of the fast growing country rich in oil and other natural resources, was a notch above the capitals of its Caucasian neighbours: Tbilisi and Yerevan. Even so, I was in for a pleasant surprise – or rather blown away – when I arrived in Baku.

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.

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

Conference fatigue or post-conference blues?

Yesterday I completed the online feedback questionnaire for the IATEFL 2013 conference, which took place earlier this month in Liverpool, and, inevitably, started thinking back to the conference. It was the fourth IATEFL conference I've attended - superbly organised as ever - and probably the most intense one. Whether it was the fact that my hotel was not so close to the venue or the number of sessions on offer every day or the number of sessions I wanted to go to every day – but at the end of the week I was absolutely exhausted.

The Lexical Approach: 20 years on...

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Michael Lewis's "The Lexical Approach", the book that has changed the way many – but unfortunately not enough - teachers teach and see language. I just wanted to share with you my plans  for this anniversary year.

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".

Binomials

Photo by @aclil2climb via eltpics

Binomials are two word expressions (strong collocations) such as "dead or alive", "give and take", "law and order". 
In this activity inspired by a short film activity on FilmEnglish, students become more aware of binomial pairs in English.

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.

Start teaching lexically in 2013

Many readers of this blog have read my rants about badly designed coursebook or digital activities and heard me moan about preoccupation with single words in ELT. This has probably left you wondering what kind of approach to teaching I actually believe in. This post describes the main principles of lexical 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)

Top 12 of 2012

and tips for new bloggers

Photo by aclil2climb via eltpics

This post is written in response to Adam Simpson's blogchallenge, which, he admits himself, is an act of "shameless self-promotion". And this is a man who urged us not to vote for him when he was recently  nominated for annual Edublog Awards and who was also the winner of last year's TeachingEnglish blogathon! Anyhow, here is my Top 12 of 2012.

The Principles of Principled Eclecticism according to Chia Suan Chong

A summary of the closing plenary (Mis)-Applied Linguistics at the TESOL France colloquium on 18 November 2012

Chia explaining 'stealth pair work'

Chia Suan Chong started her plenary at the 31^st annual TESOL France colloquium by warning us there would be 65 slides in her PowerPoint and introducing the concept of stealth pair work – speaking quietly, in a muted voice with a person sitting next to you. Considering the fact the audience consisted of about 200 ELT teachers, this wasn't an easy task. I had been really looking forward to this talk, so I was prepared to shut up for 60 minutes. I had expected Chia to debunk ELT myths and show how certain findings of applied linguistics research have been misapplied in ELT. Instead, the talk went in a different direction as Chia took us on a journey through the history of ELT.

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

Every Breath You Take

A classic collocation gap-fill activity

I don't why I haven't posted this earlier because this is my favourite song when it comes to introducing for the first time the idea of collocations to students and teachers alike. It is full of verb-noun collocations ranging from very common (take a step, play a game) to less frequent (stake a claim). Note that common collocations often involve delexicalised verbs (take, make etc) with wide collocational fields while less common ones usually involve more semantically charged words (stake) which collocate with a limited number of words (claim).

Summer teaching (had me a blast)

Photo by Cleo Phas

August till about mid-October is the time of the year when I enjoy a bit of a lull at work and all my usual students (I teach small groups) are on holiday. It’s also the time of the year when I get approached by some really peculiar one-on-one students. For example, this year’s summer assortment includes the following characters:

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:

Highlighting lexical chunks with Diigo

Image by photosteve101 on Flickr
www.planetofsuccess.com/blog

Diigo is a social bookmarking tool which allows you to save and access all your bookmarks online. But it's not only a great app for keeping your links in one place; its highlighting function can be used in class for drawing students attention to and keeping track of lexical chunks in online articles, texts and web pages.


You will need to be in a connected classroom (computer, projector, access to the Internet). After your students have read the article for meaning - and possibly discussed it - ask them to underline lexical chunks, collocations and other useful bits of language. Then display the text on the board and highlight the chunks with the whole class on the board using the Highlight function on Diigo:

Two axes of word relationships

Let's start with a warmer...

Which of these tasks or exercises do you normally see in coursebooks?

1. Look at the highlighted verbs in the text and match them with the following synonyms: investigate, find, catch, escape
2. Match the adjectives with their opposites, e.g. tall / short
3. Underline in the text all the expressions with OF
4. Group the words according to categories, e.g. vehicles: car, motorcycle; musical instruments: guitar, piano etc
5. Underline all the adverbs in the text. Now underline the verbs they go with.
6. Rick says "the journey was long and tiring". What other adjectives can be used to describe journeys?
7. Which is the odd word out? gaze - smile - stare - look

You probably answered 1, 2, 4 and 7 and to a lesser extent 3, 5 and 6 

Now read on to find out why...

One word leads to ... or you've been primed!

Introducing students to the idea of lexical priming and a web tool called Netspeak

Photo by Tzvi Meller

In my previous post from the For the classroom category I shared a lesson idea which I developed for Honesty Day celebrated on 30 April (click here to see it). Apart from the song and discussion activities, students also read three articles from the Breaking News English website. To lead in to the articles I cut up the three headlines and asked my students to unjumble them, i.e. put the words in the right order. With hindsight I realised that I'd set up my students to fail as one of the headlines read:

In response to Hugh Dellar’s Dissing Dogme : In defence of… TBL

In the second installment of his thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable “Dissing Dogme” series (see here), Hugh Dellar addresses the touchy topic of language input in Dogme but this time Task-Based Learning (TBL) is also thrown in the mix. Why has TBL come under attack?

Honesty Day

April 30th is celebrated in the USA and some other countries as Honesty Day. To mark this day, Billy Joel's classic ballad was an obvious choice for my upper-intermediate students but then I also decided to develop some activities around it.

The activity outlined below is suitable for both teen and adult learners at Upper-Intermediate (B2) level and up