This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Michael Lewis's "The Lexical Approach", the book that has changed ...

Sinclair's seminal work - the bible of corpus linguistics In this post I would like to defend linguistic corpora and their relevanc...

Photo by @aclil2climb via eltpics Binomials are two word expressions (strong collocations) such as "dead or alive", "give...

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

Many readers of this blog have read my rants about badly designed coursebook or digital activities and heard me moan about preoccupation w...

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 ...

Photo by Sandy Millin via eltpics A bit less heavy on political news this year and featuring more sports, showbiz and gossip items, here...

and tips for new bloggers Photo by aclil2climb via eltpics This post is written in response to Adam Simpson's blogchallenge , ...

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

I have recently received an email from a colleague, an EFL teacher in Israel, about how her students find it difficult differentiating betwe...

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...

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 student...

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 ...

Image by photosteve101   on  Flickr www.planetofsuccess.com/blog Diigo is a social bookmarking tool which allows you to save and acces...

Let's start with a warmer... Which of these tasks or exercises do you normally see in coursebooks? Look at the highlighted ...

Introducing students to the idea of lexical priming and a web tool called Netspeak Photo by Tzvi Meller In my previous post from the ...

In the second installment of his thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable “Dissing Dogme” series (see here ), Hugh Dellar addresses th...

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 obviou...

This activity based on Beyonce's song is suitable for older teens and adults at pre-intermediate level and up. The lesson plan is based ...

Pre-listening activities: what to focus on? At last year's IATEFL conference in Brighton I was at a presentation on teaching listen...

Who is sloppier when it comes to grammar or should we all just get over it? A recent discussion on a teachers’forum has made me wonder a...

Blog visitors poll Leoxicon is about to clock up ten thousand visitors and I thought I should do something to celebrate this achievement. ...

This follows on my earlier post Teaching vocabulary out of context: is it worth the time? About a month ago I blogged about my mini acti...

In this activity, students play an online digital game (in pairs or alone at home) and then focus on the lexis related to money.