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.

8 dictionary activities

Photo by Hana Ticha
via eltpics on Flickr

A friend of mine has mastered English - which is attested by a CPE certificate - by looking up a word and carefully studying examples in a dictionary every day before going to bed. It was before the days of online dictionaries, so he was using a copy of the excellent Longman Dictionary for Advanced Learners. In the 1990s learners' dictionaries, such as Longman or Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD), started breaking away from the native speaker dictionary format (such as dictionary.com) by introducing two innovations. First, they started providing definitions using a controlled vocabulary - in the case of Longman it was the Longman Defining Vocabulary (LDV), a carefully graded list of the 2000 most frequent words in English, similar to West's General Service List (GSL). Second, they shifted the emphasis from purely defining meanings to highlighting usage through carefully chosen examples.

As dictionary publishers moved increasingly towards online platforms in the 2000s - and some discontinued the printed version, for example Macmillan - learners' dictionaries made further strides towards improving learner experience. Today's online learners' dictionaries (see the list in my Essential lexical tools) not only offer natural examples and highlight co-text, their entries come complete with collocation boxes, grammar information and common error warnings. All this makes a good learner’s dictionary an essential, indeed indispensable, learning tool. Yet, despite their obvious benefits, I find, much to my regret, that online dictionaries are underused by learners and teachers alike. Here are some activities to get your students using learner's dictionaries and hopefully starting to appreciate their value.

News Quiz 2017 - Follow Up

Activities for reviewing the language from News Quiz 2017

Collage made with photos by www.kremlin.ru [CC BY 4.0], 

Beyoncé (@beyonce) on Instagram [fair use],

Alex Fau on Flickr https://flic.kr/p/qKyoQ2 [CC BY 2.0]

I hope you enjoyed the traditional end-of-year news quiz I posted last week. As promised, here's a follow up: lots of activities aimed at reviewing and practising vocabulary (and a bit of grammar) 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. This year, the key (answers) and teachers' notes are provided at the end of each level - not as a separate file.

For a suggested sequence of activities, see last year's News Quiz Follow Up - click HERE

Update: Vocabulary from the quiz on Quizlet: https://quizlet.com/leosel/folders/news-quiz-2017/

News Quiz 2017

Image source: Billboard

Not too many celebrity deaths this year, but there is a variety of science, sport, celebrity gossip and, inevitably, some politics thrown in. I've tried to vary the format slightly by including, where possible, two stories on the same topic for example, two discoveries, two pregnancies, two air travel related stories etc. to see if this can facilitate recycling of some key lexis from the quiz - more on that under Eliciting / Recycling in the Teachers' notes.

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.

Four 'back-to-school' activities

Going back to school: some ideas for your first lesson(s)  

It’s September, the time when many are heading back to school (in the Northern Hemisphere). I thought it would be a good time to share some lexical (and lexico-grammatical) activities to start the year.

Powerful tea and other (im)possible collocations

Photo by Christina Martidou
via ELTpics on Flickr

How do you explain the notion of collocation to your students? Apart from using this great song, I often employ this simple technique: I write on the board: make and do (in the left column), homework and a mistake (in the right) and ask students to match.

Trendy terms, tantalizing techniques and talented teachers in Thessaloniki

A report from the 24th TESOL Macedonia-Thrace convention, which took place in Thessaloniki on 11-12 February

Earlier this month I had the pleasure to attend and the honour to present, for the first time, at the TESOL Macedonia-Thrace international convention in Thessaloniki. While the best thing about the conference - like with most ELT conferences lately - was catching up with teachers from my PLN, making new friends and connecting with professionals from all over Europe, here are highlights from some of the sessions I attended.

News quiz 2016 - Follow up

Photo by iphonedigital via Flickr 

flic.kr/p/J6zv2j [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Activities for reviewing the language from News Quiz 2016

Like in previous years, here's the follow-up to last week's news quiz: 13 pages of practice activities and exercises aimed at reviewing and consolidating lexis from the quiz (in 2 levels).

I hope you and students enjoy them as much as you enjoyed the quiz. If you still haven't seen this quiz, it's not to late - click HERE.

Update: Vocabulary from the quiz on Quizlet: https://quizlet.com/leosel/folders/news-quiz-2016

News quiz 2016

Photos by Chatham House [CC BY 2.0], 
Marie Lan-Nguyen [CC BY 2.0], 
wowser [CC BY-BC 2.0] on Flickr

There has been an unusually high number of celebrity deaths this year - so many that I could have built the whole quiz around it! Anyhow, here's my end-of-year offering in its traditional format, focusing on some key news stories of 2016. Like last year, I've tried to keep it light-hearted as much as possible. Politics is still there, but it's fairly evenly balanced by sports, travel and technology news.

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"?

When we were young

Based on Adele's song from her third album 25, this activity can be used with Intermediate level and up. The main focus is listening to chunks, followed by discussion of the song and reviewing the use of like/as.

UPDATE (23.7.2019): After consulting Adele's official website it does seem that the bridge of the song goes It's hard to admit that... and not "It's had to win me back" as previously believed - thank you to my wonderful teacher trainees for pointing it out. The handout and the teacher's notes have been updated accordingly.

Does the chunk argument trump the plagiarism allegations?

Photo by Marc Nozell via Flickr

[CC BY 2.0]

One of the hottest news this week has been Melania Trumps’ allegedly plagiarized speech. Why allegedly? Because although Donald Trump’s wife address at the 2016 Republican Convention bears marked similarities to Michele Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention, there is not much in it that would effectively constitute stealing in the linguistic sense.

The L in ELT

A report from the International ETAI Conference "Engage Enhance Energize" which took place in Ashkelon, Israel, between 4 and 6 July 2016

When Naomi Epstein asked everyone who was planning to attend and present at ETAI 2014 Summer conference to sum up their teaching career and life in seven words, I wrote “Let’s put the L back in ELT” as my 7-word bio. Nobody seemed to mind or make a big deal. This is unlike LexicalLab's similar-sounding strap-line "Putting the Language back into Language Teaching" which has drawn criticism from some who found it arrogant and insulting.

 

Those who can't

I'm a ________ (1) teacher of English (what has recently become a bad word has been blanked out as to not offend anyone). As readers may have gathered from the content of this blog, I love language. I’m also a language learner. I’ve spent all my teaching and training career improving my knowledge of English and honing my understanding of how it works. Especially since I started teaching more lexically, I’ve been paying more attention to how words combine into patterns and how vocabulary interacts with grammar to create meaning.

Criticism of the Lexical Approach

"All chunks and no pineapple?"
Image by Andrew Malone via Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Writing an essay or working on a paper on the Lexical Approach and looking to include some sources that criticise it to make your writing balanced? I've collated a list of relevant articles here.

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

News quiz 2015

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

The dress which went viral

To tell the truth, I almost broke the tradition this year when I decided not to publish my annual quiz. The year has been so depressing I simply couldn't think of the news items that wouldn't be about terror and murder. But, at the insistence of friends and colleagues, here's this year's edition of the lexically enriched news quiz, which I've tried to keep light on politics.

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.

Colligation and a bottom-up approach to grammar

Summary of Hugh Dellar's IATEFL webinar Following the patterns: colligation and the necessity of a bottom-up approach to grammar - September 2015

For most people, the Lexical Approach is about focusing more on vocabulary in general and collocations in particular. Personally, however, I have always thought that the crux of the Lexical Approach is a different approach to teaching grammar. Lewis himself acknowledges that the Lexical approach “means giving attention to a much wider range of patterns which surround individual words […] In this respect, it is a more ‘grammatical’ approach than the traditional structural syllabus“ (2000:149-150, author’s emphasis).

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.

8 things I've learned about Special Education Needs this summer

Public Domain image

Last week I was involved in another Train the Trainer course (Summer School) organised by the British Council in partnership with the Ministry of Education of Israel. The focus was Special Education Needs, and I had the privilege to work together with top expert in the field, Aharona Gvaryahu, MOE National Counselor for Students with Learning Difficulties, who was my co-trainer. While my role was sharing my knowledge and experience in designing and delivering teacher training workshops, my co-trainer as well as the participants of the course were a source of number of interesting insights into Special education, which I would like to share below: