Humor4u

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...

A summary of the closing plenary (Mis)-Applied Linguistics at the TESOL France colloquium on 18 November 2012 Chia explaining 'stealth pair work' Chia Suan Chong started her plenary at the 31 st annual TESOL France colloquium by warning us there would be 65 slides in her PowerPoint and introducing the concept of stealth pair work – speaking quietly, in a muted voice with a person sitting next to you. Considering the fact the audience consisted of about 200 ELT teachers, this wasn't an easy task. I had been really looking forward to this talk, so I was prepared to shut up for 60 minutes. I had expected Chia to debunk ELT myths and show how certain findings of applied linguistics research have been misapplied in ELT. Instead, the talk went in a different direction as Chia took us on a journey through the history of ELT. From all translation to no translation Her colourful account of different methodologies started from the Grammar Translation method. According to this oldes...

In the second installment of his thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable “Dissing Dogme” series (see here ), Hugh Dellar addresses the touchy topic of language input in Dogme but this time Task-Based Learning (TBL) is also thrown in the mix. Why has TBL come under attack? I enjoy reading Hugh Dellar’s posts, especially his latest anti-Dogme series which he pulls off with such ease and eloquence (and often withering sarcasm). For those who don’t know, Hugh Dellar is an advocate of the Lexical Approach and, together with Andrew Walkley, the co-author of Innovations and Outcomes , the only EFL textbooks available on the market written from a lexical perspective (you can read my very favourable post about Innovations here ) I’ve always thought that TBL and Lexical Approach with their focus on meaning and the emphasis on use and exposure are close cousins. That’s why I was surprised to see that while pulling Dogme to pieces Hugh Dellar also talks disparagingly of TBL. In doing so, he dr...