Humor4u

Photos of the Week section in The Atlantic Although the lockdown restrictions are gradually being eased in many countries, remote teaching is still in effect - and looks set to continue for the unforeseeable future. Here is an activity I’ve been using a lot at the beginning of my Zoom lessons lately. I suppose you can call it a warmer. Activity Level:   any - but would work best with B1+ students; a bit of a struggle for A2 but can be done with a lot of support from the teacher Focus:  Speaking and later  Writing Aim:   Come up with captions for memorable images depicting current events  Preparation Google: BBC Week in Pictures . Find the latest one. The new photo collection is always published on Saturday so, at the moment of writing this, the latest one is for the week of 16 - 22 May 2020:  www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52768835 Other sources are I use are: - The Guardian  - 20 Photographs of the Week:  www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/series/twe...

A small glyph with lots of functions An article in Time magazine entitled The History of #—and 6 Other Symbols that Rule Twitter and the Web  (published 4 years ago, but which I came across this year) talks about how various little known or underused punctuation symbols have gained more prominence after being adopted in computing and, more recently, on the social media. We learn that the at sign, @, was given a new lease of life in 1971 thanks to the creation of email, and the hash/pound sign, #, the formal name of which is  octothorpe , was rehabilitated thanks to Twitter. The word "asterisk" comes from Latin / Greek words meaning "star" I wouldn't agree though with the author's take on the asterisk, *, described as "a singularly underemployed mark", which is "rarely seen in print". Was it really a neglected symbol resurrected with the advent of the Internet like the hash (#) and the slash ( / )? Admittedly, the asterisk has more uses to...

10 things you didn't know last week is a digest of news snippets published every Friday on the BBC website. You can find it in a section called Magazine Monitor . The items chosen for inclusion tend be offbeat and quirky news - very often to do with science. Each story is linked to its source - on the BBC website or elsewhere on the web. Below are some ideas on how you can use 10 things you didn't know in class. You will see that all of them require no preparation on the part of the teacher. The suggestions are based on the latest digest published on 27 November, which you can see HERE . UPDATE (11.03.2017) : 10 things... have been moved to the  Magazine  section. The easiest way to find it is to google:  BBC Magazine 10 things  + date e.g.   11.03 (it is updated on Saturday) 1. What do you know? Hand out a printout of 10 things you didn't know ... - see below. Students discuss in pairs or groups which is the most interesting / unusual / surprising, which one...

"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...

One of the pleasures of teaching lexically is when you see your students starting to incorporate i nto their speech and writing  lexical chunks studied in class - albeit  not always appropriately . Here is a thank you letter I recently received from my students at the end of a course. Reproduced here verbatim Leo How many years have you been our teacher? Actually, we really don't know, what we know is that you are our best teacher and we love you admire you and want you to be our teacher forever. It is not easy to teach three old persons for so many years, but you don’t try to get rid of us you don't stick to rules or concept except collocations. You try every year to come up with new approach, a new method, and new ideas. You do a lot that every lesson will be uplifting and a little bit heavy. You have the talent to get through to your students about the importance of remembering the collocations. We all get on with each other very well and there's ne...

Second Language Acquisition ( SLA ) research also needs a lexical revolution to free itself from the shackles of grammar tyranny.  Rant alert! Photo by richardoyork on Flickr [ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 ] I was recently asked to give a talk at a conference on the topic of writing. Since my main area of interest is vocabulary/grammar (i.e. language) rather than developing skills  per se , I decided to take a more "lexical approach" to my talk and focus on error correction in L2 writing: both lexical and grammatical. I scoured a lot of research articles to glean the current state of knowledge about error correction or - as it is more fashionable to say today – corrective feedback. As I expected, the research literature on corrective feedback has been dominated in the past 15 years by the Truscott/Ferris debate. In his thoroughly researched and passionately argued 1996 paper in Language Learning , Truscott famously claimed that error correction is not only ineffective – based on metaa...