Humor4u

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 ...

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...

Summary of my talk at the MOFET  Institute on 15 February 2011 Post-intermediate EFL learners already have a command of grammar structures , reasonable vocabulary , with particularly good receptive skills , and can generally communicate well in a variety of situations. What they need now is to extend the range of vocabulary to be able to convey subtler meanings and use language appropriately , and make the all-too-difficult transition from receptive to productive use. There are several paths they can take to improve their English language proficiency and move beyond the notorious "intermediate plateau". In my workshop I highlighted the following areas which often pose difficulty for post-intermediate learners: 1. conceptual metaphors 2. formulaic language 3. multi-part verbs 4. collocational competence These areas of difficulty have been pointed out by a number of studies which compared native-speaker and non-native speaker corpora and which were referred to in my talk. F...