Rod Ellis presenting While in Toronto for TESOL 2015 convention last month, I also attended - for the first time - the AAAL (American Association of Applied Linguistics) 2015 conference . The annual AAAL conference is conveniently held right before TESOL which gives ELT professionals travelling from all corners of the world an opportunity to attend both events back to back: the more classroom-oriented TESOL and its more highbrow cousin AAAL. Here are some highlights: Good news for incidental vocabulary acquisition Speaker: Rod Ellis , University of Auckland Renowned applied linguist Rod Ellis described an experiment he conducted with his PhD student to see whether students can pick up new vocabulary while listening. The answer is yes. Although relative gains (in receptive knowledge) were small, repeated listening (3 times) had an overall positive effect. As if anticipating an argument from the audience that repeating a listening task might seem as unauthentic, Ellis defended the vali