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Traditional quiz for your first lesson in 2014 By lasanta.com.ec  via Flickr [CC BY 2.0] For some reason I had a hard time coming up with news items for this year's quiz. Not that the year was uneventful but somehow there were no sex scandals, jumps from space or viral videos which usually make good questions for the quiz. There were lots of deaths though, which is reflected in the questions, and while we're on the topic I'd like to mention that our field has also lost three notable figures in 2013: Leo Van Lier, Earl Stevick and Dave Willis (see my tribute  HERE ) Anyhow, as in the past, the quiz comes in two versions: the upper level version is suitable for upper-intermediate/advanced level students (B2 +) and the easier, lower level version for lower intermediate students (B1 -). The detailed 7-page teachers notes (scroll all the way down) provide ideas on how to use the quiz with your students and how to explore the language from the quiz. In a few days, as usual, I wil

"Early." It's one of those words like "new" and "fast," isn't it? As though they are inherently good, and their opposites - "late," "old" and "slow" - are somehow bad. Believing in the value and virtue of being an early bird has deep roots in our cultural consciousness. It goes back at least as far as ancient Athens. Aristotle's  treatise on household economics  said that early rising was both virtuous and beneficial: "It is likewise well to rise before daybreak; for this contributes to health, wealth and wisdom." But just as Gertrud came to suspect the benefits for her of being early weren't all they were cracked up to be, earliness isn't always better in other areas either. The "get in early!" assumption has an in-built tendency to lead us astray when it comes to detection of diseases and conditions. And even most physicians - just the people we often rely on to inform us - don't

As the year draws to a close it’s time for various top 10, 20 etc lists. I am going to limit myself to 3 and share the web tools that have undoubtedly been my favourite this year. Three different tools - three different uses. Lyricstraining – Listening Listen to various songs and complete gaps in the lyrics. I first learned about this tool at the IATEFL conference in Brighton in 2011 – interestingly, it was mentioned during one of the Pecha Kucha presentations in the evening. I found my notes from the conference about a year later and this year it has been one of my favourite tools. I hope my students enjoy it as much as I do! How it works       Choose a song. Then choose one of three available levels (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) and click on play. As the song plays you have to complete the gaps in the lyrics. The difference between the levels is the number of gaps. Regardless of students’ level I always recommend starting with the Beginner level where you have on average 20 ra

In response to the blog tag challenge By Masachi Mochida via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] I’ve been tagged. Twice. In a blog challenge the idea of which is to post 11 random facts about oneself, answer 11 questions posted by the blogger who tagged you and then pass the baton by posting 11 questions and tagging 11 other bloggers. Why 11 - I have no idea. If it had been up to me I’d have gone for 13 (since it’s 2013) like last year’s Adam Simpson’s 12 of 2012 blog challenge (see  HERE ). Anyhow, I’ve been tagged this week by both Rachael Roberts who named me as one of her 11 favourite bloggers (by the way, it’s mutual) and KathyFagan , whose blog I am less familiar with (but it’s going to change!) and who, unlike Rachael, I haven’t met. Thank you both.  So here we go… 11 Random facts about me My latest creations: White Lady and Fuzzy Navel I like making salads. I’ve recently taken up cocktail-making as a hobby. I think it’s a hobby that provides a lot of health benefits in the form of Vit

Image source: www.universalstudiosentertainment.com I use a lot of films in my teaching: not just occasional Youtube clips but full-length authentic feature films, and I’ve been wanting for a while to start a new section on this blog where I would upload my film-based materials. I thought December would be a suitable time to share materials for many people’s favourite Christmas film Love Actually . Warning : some scenes are suitable for adults only Activities actually The activities are divided into three parts. They are not particularly imaginative - mainly questions to answer while watching. Feel free to adapt them. Pages 1-2 are for the first part of the film (until 4 weeks to Christmas title appears ) Pages 3-8   focus on various characters. You can divide the class into 4 groups and assign each group different characters. Because it's quite a big chunk of the film (more than an hour) students can watch this part at home. Alternatively, you can focus on (a pair of) characters

A summary of the TESOL France’s  32nd annual colloquium  which took place in Paris between 22 and 24 November 2013. ELT conferences often have a title or theme with various presentations loosely related to it. TESOL France’s annual colloquium held in Paris in November isn’t one of them. However, this year’s colloquium, my third, had an underlying theme for me – experimental practice . Here are highlights of some of the sessions I went to. What do you need ? A bit of TPRS, perhaps? After this year’s unusual opening on Friday - instead of a traditional opening plenary the organisers decided to experiment with a brief welcome address by the chair of TESOL followed by mingling - the first session I went to was Judith Logsdon-Dubois's on TPRS. I had virtually got to know Judith through Twitter and her comments on this blog, but TPRS turned out to be not quite what I’d expected. It is not a twist on TPR (Total Physical Response), an “alternative” ELT approach of the 1970s inspired by Kra

Are there any geeks out there interested in new podcasts? What about podcasts about Android development? Tor Norbye and I are proud to announce a new podcast we've started called Android Developers Backstage. It's a podcast by and for Android programmers, featuring engineers on the Android team at Google talking about features, APIs, and technologies that we think are important for developers to know about. Or which we find interesting. Or which randomly happened to come up on the show. If your podcast client still has room and you have an extra half-hour (ish) every month (ish), then subscribe and tune in. You can find the podcast on Feedburner . Just click on one of the various links on that page to add it to your podcast client of choice. The inaugural episode is about Android KitKat, with Tor and I talking about some of the new features in the latest release. In future episodes of the podcast, we'll interview other engineers on the team to deep-dive technologies they&#

Leonard is so lucky! He's just asked a very complicated question and he's not getting an over-confident and misleading answer. Granted, he was likely hoping for an easier one! But let's dive into it. "Does": that auxiliary verb packs a punch. How do we know whether something does or doesn't work?   It would be great if that were simple, but unfortunately it's not. I talk a lot here at Statistically Funny about the need for trials and systematic reviews of them to help us find the answers to these questions. But whether we're talking about trials or other forms of research, statistical techniques are needed to help make sense of what emerges from a study. Too often, this aspect of research is going to lead us down a garden path. It's common for people to take the approach of relying only, or largely, on testing for statistical significance . People then often assume this means that it's been shown whether or not the could occur by chance alone

We just released Android KitKat and posted lots of information about it: Developer highlights: http://developer.android.com/about/versions/kitkat.html Android Developers Blog: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/10/android-44-kitkat-and-updated-developer.html Videos (an overview one plus lots of others that dive deeper into specific features): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sONcojECWXs&list=PLWz5rJ2EKKc-2quE-o0enpILZF3nBZg_K&index=1 I'll specifically call out the video on Transitions, which is something I recorded last week after finally finishing the feature. I hope that the API is another step toward making animations easier and more automatic in Android applications.

Image source: www.willis-elt.co.uk I opened my Facebook yesterday morning and was saddened to see Chia Suan Chong’s post about the passing of Dave Willis. I went over to Twitter and the feed was already filled with RIPs and condolences. For most in the ELT world Dave Willis’s name is associated with Task-Based Learning. But his contribution to lexical approaches to language teaching is just as outstanding. In fact, his pioneering work on the first Lexical Syllabus predates Michael Lewis’s seminal book by three years, the main difference between the two being words as a starting point for Willis and collocations for Lewis. In the late 1980s Collins published a new EFL textbook co-authored by Dave Willis and his wife Jane. The book was an outcome of the COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Database) project – at that time the biggest and most significant attempt to compile a corpus of contemporary English. Simply titled Collins Cobuild English Course, the book was based o