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 Questions about words In my talk at IATEFL this year, I explained some of the limitations of asking traditional concept questions, especially when looking at vocabulary. What follows is a list of alternative types of checking questions about vocabulary. You may see some of the same question frames I used in the talk. The questions that I give […]
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 […]
Mar 9, 2015 Core Principles, Resources 4 Language is patterned We have already see that one problem with the grammar + words view of language is that words are difficult to define, but the same could equally said of grammar on its own. In the case of Pinker’s book, Words and Rules, grammar is very narrowly defined as basically the rules of morphology (adding -ed […]
