Humor4u

Traditional lexically-enriched end-of-year news quiz for the first lesson of the new year By Anthony Quintano  via Flickr [ CC BY 2.0 ] In keeping with the tradition started when this blog was born (4 years ago today), here is my end-of-year news quiz.  As usual, it's available in two levels (advanced and intermediate) and comes complete with a 9-page teachers guide with ideas on how the quiz can be used in class. A word of reminder: the quiz is not meant to test your students' general knowledge but to expand their vocabulary. Over the years I've begun to feel that every year my quiz contains the same language such as cause controversy, got into hot water, battle with drug addiction, came to an abrupt end  to describe politicians' faux pas and celebrity deaths that occur with unwavering regularity every year. So this year, a slew of new lexical chunks make their debut in the quiz: quirky sense of humour , eligible bachelor and ruffle feathers to name but a few .  See f

Photo by Sudhamshu Hebbar on Flickr [CC BY 2.0] An article written by the British linguist Vyvyan Evans entitled “Language Instinct is a Myth” which I shared on Twitter the other day triggered a lively discussion with my colleagues . One of the questions raised on Twitter was how come the idea that we are born with a built-in language capacity (aka the innateness hypothesis ) has prevailed for so long and Chomsky, its main promoter, is part of all Master's in TESOL programmes if the theory has largely been discredited (Scott Thornbury asks the same question on his in X is for X-bar Theory ). This was indeed the case on my MA programme: Behaviorism and Chomsky took up a large part of two of my Psycholinguistics courses while such a fascinating, more recent theory as Connectionism received scant or almost no attention. Now that I am on the giving end, i.e. giving rather than listening to lectures, I was also surprised at the lack of references to Connectionism in an SLA course syll

Sounds great, doesn't it? Getting clinical trial results quickly has so much going for it. Information sooner! More affordable trials! Substituting outcomes that can take years, or even decades, to emerge, with ones you can measure much earlier, makes clinical research much simpler. This kind of substitute outcome is called a surrogate (or intermediate) endpoint or outcome. Surrogates are often biomarkers - biological signs of disease or a risk factor of disease, like cholesterol in the blood. They are used in clinical care to test for, or keep track of, signs of emerging or progressing disease. Sometimes, like cholesterol, they're the target of treatment. The problem is, these kinds of substitute measures aren't always reliable. And sometimes we find that out in the hardest possible way. The risk was recognized as soon as the current methodology of clinical trials was being developed in the 1950s. A famous statistician who was key to that process, Austin Bradford-Hill , pu

"Perform surgery" or "carry out surgery"? Photo by Austin Samaritans  via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.O] What kind of collocations are most mistake-prone: strong (e.g. honk the horn,  s hrug shoulders ), medium-strong (e.g.  wage a war, fail a test ), medium-weak (e.g.  perform an experiment, reach a compromise ) or weak (e.g.  see a film, read the newspaper )? In the previous post in the series (see HERE ), I looked at some studies focusing on collocational errors across different levels of proficiency and what causes them. One of the studies I cited was by Nadja Nesselhauf (I think it was her doctoral thesis). The study is also interesting in that she tried to pinpoint which collocations are more problematic for learners. But first of all, What counts as a collocation?  Learners often have problems with collocations, but what kind of collocations cause more difficulty? On the one hand, there are idioms, such as foam at the mouth , which are technically collocations (verb +

I often make students (and teachers I work with) get out of their seats. I think movement in the classroom is important whether you believe in the now  hotly debated concept of learning styles  or because  cognition is embodied . Apart from onion ring debates and mingling activities, there are many movement activities you can do using classroom walls. A  recent article in English Teaching Professional suggested ideas for taking advantage of all four classroom walls using whiteboards. I would like to share some ideas on how I use walls in my classrooms without any additional whiteboards required. All you need is paper (usually cut-up) and some Blu-tack       Taking strips of paper OFF the walls This is a “kinaesthetic” alternative to a vocabulary matching activity. Stick the words on the walls around the classroom and hand out to students (in groups) lists of different definitions. Students have to walk around and take off the walls the words that match their definitions. The activit

I can neither confirm nor deny that Cecil is now a participant in one of the there-is-no-limit-to-the-human-lifespan resveratrol studies at  Harvard's "strictly guarded mouse lab" ! If he is, I'm sure he's even more baffled by the humans' hype over there. Resveratrol is the antioxidant in grapes that many believe makes drinking red wine healthy. And it's a good example of how research on animals is often terribly misleading and misinterpreted. I've written about it over at Absolutely Maybe  if you're interested in a classic example of the rise and fall of animal-research-based hype (or more detail about resveratrol). But this week, it's media hype about a study using human stem cells in mice in another lab at Harvard that's made me ratty. You could get the idea that a human trial of a "cure" for type 1 diabetes is just a matter of time now - and not a lot of time at that. According to the leader of the team , Doug Melton, "We

Video is often used in the EFL classroom for listening comprehension activities, facilitating discussions and, of course, language work. But how can you exploit silent films without any language in them? Since developing learners' linguistic resources should be our primary goal (well, at least the blogger behind the blog thinks so), here are four suggestions on how language (grammar and vocabulary) can be generated from silent clips. Split-viewing Split-viewing is an information gap activity where the class is split into groups with one group facing the screen and the other with their back to the screen. The ones facing the screen than report on what they have seen - this can be done WHILE as well as AFTER they watch. Alternatively, students who are not watching (the ones sitting with their backs to the screen) can be send out of the classroom and come up with a list of the questions to ask the 'watching group'. This works particularly well with action or crime scenes with

All of the talks from Devoxx 2013 are now freely available on the parleys.com website. This includes all of the talks that I did with Romain Guy on Android: Filthy Rich [Android] Clients What's New in Android Android Performance Workshop Part 1 Android Performance Workshop Part 2 There's also an interview about the new features in KitKat. Then there's this somewhat less relevant Patterns, Shmatterns talk I did about software design patterns. All of the slides from the Android talks are posted  on Romain's blog .

Not a proper blog post this time but just a list of references and useful links I have compiled for a series of workshops I have been giving this summer. Ninety minutes is not enough for even an Introduction to... kind of workshop so I thought I'd put together a list for the participants to continue exploring the Lexical approach on their own. The workshops were commissioned by the British Council, hence a slight slant towards the British Council - BBC Teaching English website. The list has already come in handy for someone doing Lexis as a topic in one of her LSAs of module 2 of DELTA so I am sure it can be useful for many others too. Did I leave anything important out? Should anything else be included? Do let me know in the comments below. The list can also be accessed via this short link: http://bit.ly/LAref The presentation used to accompany the workshop can be found  HERE

I've written this article about preparing and giving presentations:

All of the videos have been posted from the various sessions I was in this year. Here they are, along with links to the slides. What's new in Android A presentation with  +Dan Sandler  that provides a quick overview of some of the larger features and new APIs in the L Developer Preview release and other new bits in the recent Androidosphere. There's also a really good deep-dive into Notifications, since Dan's the non-local expert on the subject. Slides (PDF) Material science This session, presented with  +Adam Powell , provides an overview of the engineering side of the Material design system. Many of the other sessions at Google I/O this year discussed the design side; this presentation covers the technical details of the APIs and the capabilities exposed by the framework for Android developers. Slides (PDF) Material witness I was happy to be joined once again by former Android developer and UI Toolkit team lead  +Romain Guy  for this talk on some of the new Material desig