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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...

Insights from Penny Ur’s IATEFL 2023 talk in lieu of a proper conference report Few people in the industry can make research sound sexy the way Penny Ur and Scott Thornbury can. But it’s probably only the now retired Penny Ur who can get away with a conference session entitled Interesting recent research and the blurb that goes:  “One of the advantages of being retired but still involved in ELT is that one has more time to browse through recent books and journals in search of interesting research studies. In this session, I’ll share some of the ones I’ve found on a variety of topics…” Penny Ur started her session with some caveats: not all the research is applicable or practicable for the classroom while not everything that goes on in the classroom is supported by research – a sentiment she has often expressed elsewhere .  After defining what is meant by recent (the last 5-10 years) and what is considered interesting (what she personally finds interesting), in what follow...

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 ...

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...

"Perform surgery" or "carry out surgery"? Photo by Austin Samaritans  via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.O] What kind of collocations are most mistake-prone: strong (e.g. honk the horn,  s hrug shoulders ), medium-strong (e.g.  wage a war, fail a test ), medium-weak (e.g.  perform an experiment, reach a compromise ) or weak (e.g.  see a film, read the newspaper )? In the previous post in the series (see HERE ), I looked at some studies focusing on collocational errors across different levels of proficiency and what causes them. One of the studies I cited was by Nadja Nesselhauf (I think it was her doctoral thesis). The study is also interesting in that she tried to pinpoint which collocations are more problematic for learners. But first of all, What counts as a collocation?  Learners often have problems with collocations, but what kind of collocations cause more difficulty? On the one hand, there are idioms, such as foam at the mouth , which are technically collocation...

By jjpacres  via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0] I often cite research in my talks so in this series of posts I would like to share some interesting studies which looked at how second language (L2) learners use collocations. This post reviews three studies  which sought to answer, among others, the following questions: 1. At what level of proficiency are learners more likely to make collocational errors?  2. To what extent are learner’s errors caused by negative transfer (aka interference) from L1? One of the most widely cited studies on the topic (283 citations according to Google Scholar) was conducted in Germany by Nadja Nesselhauf. Nesselhauf investigated how advanced level students use verb+noun collocations (e.g. raise the question of , perform a task or conduct a study - from the previous sentence). After analysing more than 30 essays which were written by L2 German students and judged by native speakers she concluded that advanced learners have considerable difficultie...