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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Apr 21, 2015 Exploiting Exercises, Resources Good CCQs for vocabulary Concept checking questions are a way to ensure students have understood what you taught. However, there are issues with CCQs for vocabulary as I explained in my talk at IATEFL. CCQs for grammar CCQs were really first designed for grammar and really at a rather different time for teaching. They came at the end of […]
Mar 31, 2015 Exploiting Exercises, Resources Van Gogh’s ear and wordlists We’ve had a suggested adaptation of some material from a teacher, Amber Nowak, in the Netherlands. It’s a little bit different to what we initially envisaged here in that Amber has already exploited the material in the book, Go for It 3, by David Nunan by extracting and focusing on vocabulary in a text about […]
