Several years ago now, I wrote a conference talk entitled - rather wittily, I felt - What have corpora ever done for us? In retrospect, I now realise it's quite probable that the fact its title and much of its…
Author Archive
Belgrade, Serbia: ELTA conference
Complicating the anti-coursebook debate: Part 1
As some of you may be aware, there's been a fair bit of coursebook bashing going on in the blogosphere over recent weeks, much of it carried out by Geoff Jordan. Given this, I've decided to lay down a few…
Making active and creative use of all the languages in your classroom.
I was recently at the third annual BELTA Day conference in Brussels, organised by the excellent Belgian English Language Teachers' Association. Whilst there, I saw a really fascinating presentation by a local teacher called Joris Van Den Bosch. Joris has…
Politics, pronunciation and the pursuit of perfection
Tomorrow is election day here in the United Kingdom, and it looks set to be one of the most unpredictable results in many, many years. Depressingly, one of the key features of the political landscape over the last few years…
BELTA conference. Belgium.
Asking more: why some questions are better than others
There's an old saying that claims questions are never dangerous - only answers are. Well, a recent presentation I saw by Jim Scrivener gave me pause to reconsider this received wisdowm and to ask whether some questions might be if…