Humor4u

Some highlights from the annual IATEFL conference, which took place in Belfast on 17-20 May The first post-pandemic 'in-person' IATEFL conference saw a slight dip in attendance figures – about 1600 delegates compared to the pre-pandemic figures of nearly 2500 attendees – but it didn't detract from the electric atmosphere, which was largely due to the ability to interact face-to-face again. Indeed, I didn't see members of my PLN for three long years! Between networking and catching up with friends and colleagues I managed to see some sessions. Here are some highlights. In her first IATEFL presentation, the proud IATEFL scholarship winner Rachel Tsateri shared a framework for planning collaborative and reflective online lessons she had devised during the period of emergency remote teaching. She referred to the framework – or at least the main portion of it – as a jigsaw-gloss . As the name suggests, the framework combines two collaborative lea...

Summary of Hugh Dellar's IATEFL webinar Following the patterns: colligation and the necessity of a bottom-up approach to grammar  - September 2015 For most people, the Lexical Approach is about focusing more on vocabulary in general and collocations in particular. Personally, however, I have always thought that the crux of the Lexical Approach is a different approach to teaching grammar. Lewis himself acknowledges that the Lexical approach “means giving attention to a much wider range of patterns which surround individual words […] In this respect, it is a more ‘grammatical’ approach than the traditional structural syllabus“ (2000:149-150, author’s emphasis). Hugh Dellar, co-author of the only two coursebook series that incorporate the Lexical Approach – Innovations and, to a lesser extent, Outcomes , has shown in his books how this, lexico-grammatical approach can be put in practice. In his IATEFL webinar, he brought in theoretical evidence from J.H. Firth and Michael Hoey to dr...

Image by @sandymillin via eltpics on Flickr For the first time since it was last held in Harrogate (2010), I didn’t go to the annual IATEFL conference this year and - like thousands of other English teachers who couldn’t afford to go to the largest EFL conference in the world - settled in comfortably in front of my computer to watch it online. All plenary talks and selected presentations are streamed live on the IATEFL online website thanks to the partnership between IATEFL and the British Council. I was particularly looking forward to the talks by Prof Michael Hoey on 4 April ( "Old approaches, new perspectives" - click HERE to watch the recording) and Prof Sugata Mitra on 5 April ( "The future of learning"- click HERE for the recording) and highly recommended them to all my students (teacher candidates). With Prof M. Hoey at the Lexical Conference in London, May 2013 (Photo by Ela Wassel) Michael Hoey's theory of lexical priming, which grew out of his work...

Yesterday I completed the online feedback questionnaire for the IATEFL 2013 conference, which took place earlier this month in Liverpool , and, inevitably, started thinking back to the conference. It was the fourth IATEFL conference I've attended - superbly organised as ever - and probably the most intense one. Whether it was the fact that my hotel was not so close to the venue or the number of sessions on offer every day or the number of sessions I wanted to go to every day – but at the end of the week I was absolutely exhausted. New format   I don't know whether the new format –  30 minutes for talks, 45 minutes for workshops – is the way to go. I felt 30 minutes presentations (including mine) were somewhat rushed while 45-minute workshops didn't have anything workshop-y about them. I stupidly put myself down for a talk and had to cut my presentation by half from its original 60 minute length - as it was given at TESOL France 2012. To do so I had to get rid of all ...

What should I do with these? Photo by Tzvi Meller I’ve always envied people who can whip up a blog post straight after returning from – or sometimes while still at - a conference. Although I didn’t write any IATEFL 2012 reflections there was one session that particularly resonated with me: Andrew Walkley’s Technology and principles in language learning . He talked about how trying to bring technology to our digitally native learners many teachers have lost the focus on language. He listed five things that he found particularly worrying about unprincipled integration of technology into ELT: Vocabulary and grammar are seen as separate entities Grammar domination Vocabulary taught in sets Activity overload Skills are separated from language Andrew seems to have taken the thoughts right out of my head – only I was afraid to verbalise them apart from  this post where I lightly bemoaned the lack of web tools and apps focusing on the link between grammar and vocabulary, multi-word phras...

Pre-listening activities: what to focus on? At last year's IATEFL conference in Brighton I was at a presentation on teaching listening where I got into a bit of an argument with the speaker. I don't know if it was my nerves before my own, first presentation at IATEFL but I wasn't on my best behaviour, which I later regretted. The whole situation was rather ridiculous. Even more ridiculous was the fact that in principle I agreed with the presenter who argued that there is little benefit in pre-teaching vocabulary before listening activities - I wouldn't agree though with his claim the word "prowl", one my favourite words in English, is useless :) There is an interesting piece of research to substantiate the speaker's argument, which he surprisingly did not mention. Chang and Read (2006) administered a listening comprehension test to160 students who were divided into four groups and received a different kind of support: 1.     Providing background informatio...