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  Penny Ur shares research she finds interesting at IATEFL 2023 Penny Ur posting for photos with fans after her IATEFL talk (19.4.23) This is the second instalment of my two-part post about Penny Ur’s session at IATEFL matter-of-factly entitled Interesting recent research , in which, in a span of 30 minutes, I learned more than during the rest of the conference.  Click HERE for the first part. The reason why it’s taken me so long to publish this (IATEFL took place in April ) is that it’s not merely a summary of the talk. Upon my return I did some digging into the sources Penny Ur cited; the result is a summary combined with some personal reflections. By her own admission, she whizzed through so many studies in the talk that I only focus on those that are interesting to me . The previous part covered the age factor, the use of L1 and error correction; in this one we turn to the following three strands of research: inferencing meaning from context, the flipped classroom and the...

Photo by @Mr_Schenk via eltpics About a month ago I took part in a debate entitled Teaching Vocabulary: in or out of context where I was on the team defending teaching vocabulary in context. I hereby confess that on occasions I had to resort to unfair tactics to win the debate. While making the case for teaching vocabulary in context, I argued, for example, that the word goal should be taught together with either: achieve or score otherwise, there would be no way to distinguish between the two senses of the word. Or take the word key.  How can you know, I argued, whether it is a key to a door a key on a keyboard or a key to solving the problem In actual truth, what I was referring to is not context of a word but rather its  co-text . I first came across the term co-text when reading Michael Lewis's The Lexical Approach but later found out that it was probably first used by Michael Halliday, a systemic functional linguist, who distinguished between: co-text – the linguistic...

I have recently received an email from a colleague, an EFL teacher in Israel, about how her students find it difficult differentiating between near-synonyms. I repost here my reply alongside the original email with the author's kind permission. Hi Leo, I wonder whether you can help me. Do you know any place on the web where I can compare the meanings of near synonyms? I've used the concordance type sites which give me lots of collocations, but that isn't what I want. It doesn't help my pupils to give them 10 collocations for each word (e.g. regular, usual, routine ) some of which are identical. I need to be able to put my finger on a general rule(s) like, one is for people and the other is for abstract ideas (I know this example is irrelevant to those particular words) Thanks for any help you can provide. Renee Wahl Dear Renee, First of all, it's great to know that you use concordance software. I wouldn't give pupils 10 collocations for each word as it is a bit ...

This follows on my earlier post Teaching vocabulary out of context: is it worth the time? About a month ago I blogged about my mini action research on decontextualised vocabulary learning. The post  generated some discussion with some people arguing that there was nothing decontexualised about it - you can read the original post and the comments here . The main finding was that on the post-test there was no difference between the items which were learnt out of context and the items presented in class in context. So is decontextualised vocabulary teaching a justified strategy? Obvious benefits Even though the decontextualised “Go home and look up” activity produced mixed results and there was a lot of reteaching involved, I still consider it to be successful. Besides enriching their vocabulary it gives learners a sense of autonomy as well as responsibility for their learning, not to mention practice with using dictionaries, an often overlooked skill in ELT. I will definitely keep gi...