Jul 1, 2015 Exploiting Exercises, Resources When are questions and teacher talk too much? We recently had a query from a reader regarding the kind of language-generating concept questions we advocate. Basically, he had received some criticism after a lesson observation that the class was too teacher-centred, too input heavy and students didn’t have enough time for output (aka – practice or production). There is no doubt that asking concept checks […]
Jun 14, 2015 Lexis, Opinions Everything you ever wanted to know about snowclones, but were afraid to ask. 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 rhetorical framework were borrowed from a famous Monty Python sketch was lost on many who […]
May 24, 2015 Core Principles, Resources 5 Different collocations or units of meaning = different networks of words We saw in the second post in this series that coming up with clear-cut definitions of single words is difficult because individual words impact on each other and change their ‘meanings’ slightly. For example, Hanks argues that the typical usage of raging fire is different to blazing fire in that it can be seen to be a both different […]
May 17, 2015 Coursebooks, Opinions, The state of our profession 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. Given this, I’ve decided to lay down a few thoughts about the whole debate over here instead. The first point to make is something I’ve long said with regard to the Dogme […]
May 12, 2015 Classroom Activities, Lexis, Opinions 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 spent the last four years working as a secondary school EAL teacher at the British […]
