Oct 6, 2017 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Lexis, Opinions, The state of our profession On the over-use of concept-checking questions: part 1 There aren’t many things that I think should be comprehensively banned from EFL classrooms, but the use of closed CCQs (Concept-Checking Questions) for items of vocabulary is one! For those of you unfamiliar with CCQs, they seem to have come into the ELT mainstream via International House and the very early teacher training courses offered […]
May 19, 2017 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions, The state of our profession Complicating the coursebook debate part 3: coursebook use Today’s post follows on from another recent post that looked at some of the so-called false assumptions that supposedly lie at the heart of coursebooks. The assumptions, as stated in a recent piece by Geoff Jordan, are that all coursebooks and coursebook-using teachers “lead students through each unit and do the succession of activities in […]
Apr 27, 2017 Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions Complicating the coursebook debate part 2: can’t we just be friends? This week I thought I would take a break from the grammar series (to be continued!) and pick up on the discussion of coursebooks that Hugh started some time ago with the somewhat optimistically titled Complicating the coursebook debate part 1. This was almost two years ago now and we never even managed to move […]
Nov 11, 2016 Lexis, Opinions, The state of our profession It’s all in the Mind: Neurobiology and the Lexical Approach Today we’re proud to present a guest post from Bruno Leys, who works at VIVES University College, Bruges, Belgium. Bruno can be contacted on: bruno.leys@vives.be and would love to hear any comments or questions you have. Over to Bruno: When Michael Lewis published The Lexical Approach in 1993, it’s fair to say that the book […]
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 […]
