Humor4u

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

By jjpacres  via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] I often cite research in my talks so in this series of posts I would like to share some interesting studies which looked at how second language (L2) learners use collocations. This post reviews three studies  which sought to answer, among others, the following questions: 1. At what level of proficiency are learners more likely to make collocational errors?  2. To what extent are learner’s errors caused by negative transfer (aka interference) from L1? One of the most widely cited studies on the topic (283 citations according to Google Scholar) was conducted in Germany by Nadja Nesselhauf. Nesselhauf investigated how advanced level students use verb+noun collocations (e.g. raise the question of , perform a task or conduct a study - from the previous sentence). After analysing more than 30 essays which were written by L2 German students and judged by native speakers she concluded that advanced learners have considerable difficulties producing co