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Activities for reviewing and recycling the language  from News Quiz 2021 Image credits: NASA  [PD];  TapTheForwardAssist  [CC BY-SA 4.0]; Glenn Francis  [CC BY-SA 4.0] I hope you enjoyed the latest edition of the News Quiz and didn't find too difficult. Like last year, the follow-up activities come in different formats, most of which can be edited and adapted for your needs. These include drag'n'drop activities on LearningApps, one matching activity on WordWall (Intermediate level only) and 'traditional' worksheets in PDF/editable Google Docs. If you haven't seen News Quiz 2021 - click HERE Accompanying Quizlet sets :  https://quizlet.com/leosel/folders/news-quiz-2021/  (two for Advanced and one for Intermediate level) The activities are grouped by level according to the two versions of the News Quiz. Online activities Advanced (B2+/C1) Drag'n'drop 1a  https://learningapps.org/watch?v=pb8myy57522 (preview below) Drag'n'drop 1b  https://...

Activities for reviewing and recycling the language  from News Quiz 2020 Image credits: Frankie Fouganthin  [CC BY-SA 4.0],  TenAsia  [CC BY 3.0],  U.S. Secretary of Defense   [CC BY 2.0] - via Wikimedia Commons The traditional news quiz has changed its format this year so the follow up, which usually consists of paper-and-pen activities, had to follow suit. I've created a series of interactive online activities on WordWall and LearningApps, which you can adapt if necessary and share with your students. There are also 'traditional' worksheets in Word and PDF, which those of you teaching remotely can display via ScreenShare on Zoom or Teams or simply send to students by email. If you haven't seen News Quiz 2020 - click HERE . See also this Jeopardy version (Advanced level) kindly shared by a colleague of mine, Marlene Saban Accompanying Quizlet sets ( work in progress ):  https://quizlet.com/leosel/folders/news-quiz-2020/ The activities are groupe...

"All chunks and no pineapple?" Image by Andrew Malone via Flickr [ CC BY 2.0 ] Writing an essay or working on a paper on the Lexical Approach and looking to include some sources that criticise it to make your writing balanced? I've collated a list of relevant articles here. Like all other methods and approaches in ELT, the Lexical Approach has not been without its critics. Here are some articles (in chronological order) that have been critical or sceptical of the Lexical Approach or some of its aspects over the years. For a list of useful references on the Lexical Approach: click HERE Scott Thornbury -  Lexical Approach: a journey without maps One of the first criticisms expressed about the Lexical Approach, particularly Michael Lewis's over-reliance on Krashen's view of language acquisition and a lack of guiding principles for building a syllabus.  Interestingly, Scott Thornbury would go on to write Natural Grammar (OUP 2005), the only lexical grammar book on t...

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...

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...

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

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...

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 bo...

Photo by @GoldsteinBen via eltpics on Flickr A second lesson with two new pre-intermediate (A2) students (I usually put my private students in pairs). In the first lesson we read three stories about immigrants (from Innovations Pre-Intermediate ) and underlined useful bits of language (I hadn't introduced the word "chunk" yet). For our second lesson they were asked to prepare a short talk about their lives using as much "useful language" as they could – no writing! They did a pretty good job and successfully integrated some chunks into their stories: Back home… When I came over here… I didn't have enough money To support my family Naturally, their attempts to produce their own, novel utterances almost invariably caused disfluency as they searched for the right words to express their ideas and the right grammar to frame their words. Fluency is not so much speaking fast as pausing less, as Thornbury (2005) aptly observes. To avoid pauses, competent language ...

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Michael Lewis's "The Lexical Approach", the book that has changed the way many – but unfortunately not enough - teachers teach and see language. I just wanted to share with you my plans  for this anniversary year. Article The Education section of the Guardian has just run my "accessible" article about why Lewis's lexical approach hasn't gained widespread currency. Judging by the comments it has reignited the debate about traditional grammar versus chunks and whether it is the publishers' reluctance or "consumers"' conservatism that hinders the spread of new ideas in ELT. Click here to read it. Special publications I am currently guest-editing a special issue of the ETAI (English Teachers Association of Israel) Forum dedicated to the lexical approach with contributions from Hugh Dellar , Luiz Otavio Barros , Hannah Kryszewska ,  KenLackman and many others. The publication is on...

Sinclair's seminal work - the bible of corpus linguistics In this post I would like to defend linguistic corpora and their relevance to the ELT field which Hugh Dellar raises doubts about. Years ago before I became familiar with corpus tools (corpus as in linguistic corpus = "collection of samples of real-world texts stored on computer"; plural = corpora) we had a fierce debate with my colleagues whether to use the preposition to or for after the noun hint . We wanted to produce posters for English learning centres we had set up for a number of high schools and each poster was meant to provide "Hints for/to speaking / listening etc". Emails were sent back and forth about what preposition should be used and the argument inevitably turned to the British/American distinction until somebody used Google Fight to compare hints to and hints for . Google Fight provided us with pseudo-scientific evidence that hints for is slightly more common than hints to – it was ba...