Jul 3, 2025 Developing materials, Lexis, Resources, Revision Prompts for developing vocabulary materials with AI Writing good AI prompts for developing vocabulary materials was the focus of Elif Atali’s presentation at IATEFL this year. Elif is a teacher at Bursa Technical University in Turkey and was the winner of our Lexical Lab scholarship. Here she outlines her presentation and relates her wider experiences. Over to ElifWriting vocabulary materials with AIMy […]
Mar 25, 2025 Chunks, Developing materials, Lexis, Vocabulary Choice Collocations: using collocation dictionaries and AI When choosing collocations to teach, I often used references like Oxford Collocations . Now AI offers help, but is it any better? And are collocations actually what we should search for?In recent times I have done less of this kind of searching for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I tend to do this more when […]
Feb 26, 2025 Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Developing materials, Opinions, Teaching lexically Planning lessons: chat is an outcome too. When we talk about planning lessons that have an outcome, teachers often misinterpret this as meaning all lessons should have a clear practical benefit. They may feel that following an action-oriented approach (as follow the CEFR calls it), means we should only design or select tasks where students role-play practical activities, resolve problems, or reach […]
Apr 8, 2019 Beginners & Low levels, Chunks, Coursebooks, Developing materials, Grammar, Lexis What is a good coursebook for beginners? In a pevious post I explained why the typical syllabus at low levels is bad, but this does leave the question what is a good coursebook for beginners? Obviously, the short answer to this question is our own book Outcomes Beginner, but in this post and others I’m going to set out a bit more […]
Mar 28, 2019 Beginners & Low levels, Chunks, Core Principles, Coursebooks, Developing materials, Grammar Teaching grammar at low levels through chunks We could be teaching more grammar at low levels through grammaticalized chunks. We already do it sometimes, but we do it very inconsistently. Ironically, that’s because the syllabus at low levels is defined by teaching grammar, rather than being guided by what students need and want to say. Would you like some more chunks?The best […]
