Tag: EFL Vocab

Low level activities to revise vocabulary: what to choose

Written by Andrew Walkley on April 25, 2025. Posted in Beginners & Low levels, Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Lexis, Teaching lexically, Vocabulary Choice. 4 Comments on Low level activities to revise vocabulary: what to choose

To learn words students need to recall and use them multiple times, so it is good to have activities to revise vocabulary in class. In this post I look at choosing items to revise and what difference low levels makes on this and the tasks we do.Not just vocabularyThe first thing to say is that I think we should encourage students to think that when they revise vocabulary they also revise grammar. This is particularly true at the lowest levels where so many words are what might be described as grammar words and others have a an overall conceptual meaning that allows for a huge number of...

Collocations: using collocation dictionaries and AI

Written by Andrew Walkley on March 25, 2025. Posted in Chunks, Developing materials, Lexis, Vocabulary Choice. 7 Comments on 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?My well-thumbed copy of Oxford CollocationsIn recent times I have done less of this kind of searching for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I tend to do this more when I am writing coursebooks where I am maybe a bit more considered in my choices. In terms of class, I think you get better at using your ‘intuition’ if you have regularly tested yourself and done research into collocations. And...

Everyday English drawn from Greek mythology

Written by Hugh Dellar on October 13, 2023. Posted in Chunks, Phrase of the day. 4 Comments on Everyday English drawn from Greek mythology

A while back, I wrote a blog post about words and expressions that come from literature, but have passed into everyday use. Today, inspired by a recent conversation with my daughter, who’s currently obsessed with Greek mythology, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the way the ideas from old myths and stories become embedded in the language and understood even by those unfamiliar with their origins.One morning, I was having breakfast with my kids and the news was on the radio. My daughter heard the newsreader claim that ‘the NHS (the National Health Service) will be the...

Literary figures in everyday speech

Written by Hugh Dellar on January 18, 2023. Posted in Chunks, Phrase of the day. 2 Comments on Literary figures in everyday speech

In one of my recent classes, we were discussing the way in which the use of social media inside authoritarian countries like Russia, China and Iran is almost always monitored, and how posting something that’s deemed to be subversive or in opposition to the state can land you in hot water. Share an anti-government meme or express support for Ukraine or the Women, Life, Freedom protesters and you might find the secret police knocking on your door in the small hours.Many people living inside such countries are all-too well aware of the fact that Big Brother is always watching you. Now,...

Why teachers shouldn’t prefer blonde

Written by Hugh Dellar on November 5, 2014. Posted in Opinions, Vocabulary Choice. 7 Comments on Why teachers shouldn’t prefer blonde

I recently asked a couple of colleagues which word they thought was more frequent – arise or blonde. Almost immediately, the answer blonde came back. However, despite the confidence of the response, according to the British National Corpus (BNC) and various dictionaries, my colleagues were wrong! Arise is in fact nine times more frequent than blonde in the BNC. There is some evidence to suggest that my colleagues are not alone. Teachers (and students) are not very good at recognising frequency of words (see McCrostie 2007).Examples you can think of, rather than frequencyOne of the...