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...

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...

If you like reading randomized trials about skin and oral health treatments - and who doesn't? - you come across a few split-face and split-mouth ones. Instead of randomizing groups of people to different interventions so that a group of people can be a control group (parallel trials), sections of a person are randomized. It's not only done with faces and teeth. Pairs of body parts can be randomized too, like arms or legs. These studies are sometimes called "within-person" trials. This kind of randomization means that you need fewer people in the trial , because you don't have to account for all the variations between human beings. It has to be a treatment that affects only the specific area of the body treated, though. Anything that could have an influence on the "control" part is called a spill-over effect . There are still inevitably things that happen that affect the whole person, and those have to be accounted for with this kind of trial. Body part ...

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 ...

Let's talk about laziness. No, let's not just talk about being lazy - let's do something about it. Let's be lazy. There's a common pattern that I use in Android programming where I will create objects lazily, especially when these objects will not necessarily or frequently be needed at runtime. This is especially true for code that I write for the Android framework, where we like to be as lean as possible and leave more memory available for the system and the application. Often, these objects are collections. My personal favorite is ArrayList (ever since I moved on years ago from the original, but somewhat crusty,  Vector class), although I am also known to use Hashmap for those key/value pair situations (especially after I got used to ActionScript's paradigm of everything-is-a-hashmap). Of course, you can't simply start poking into a lazily-created collection willy-nilly, unless you're a big fan of NullPointerExceptions. So you need to first check ...

Agenda 21 Realization - Renewed Hope - Are Folks Finally Getting It! For decades I have engaged myself in what I term "advocacy in the face of corpocracy.  Along the way, corpocracy and its marxist/fascist approaches slithered off their (historical) slimey, brutal path of politico incursion and adopted a benevolent, warm and assuring optic deceiving many about their true intent, a lesson they well learned. Since their transformation from jack-boot subjugationists into a futuristic transhumanism, environmental sustainability facade, the inner sanctum has made great strides in displacing what people desire... fair and equitable representation in the matter of self-governance. I cannot fault the unwitting... for who would be against the wholesome tokens of environmental sustainability, political correctness and a raft of other deceptions wrapped in motherhood labels? Once the mantle of deceit took hold it seemed less and less probable the intended victims would come to realizatio...

"Fracking just the latest villain of the cult of catastrophe." Catchy disparaging phrases catch my eye, I am not about to address fracking, I am writing about the unrelenting, insidious attacks upon the character and intelligence of those who would advocate against willful, ill-advised industrial complex inspired, greed driven corporate activity, condoned by sycophant governance with no thought to our future, well being or prospects. Corporate shill headlines are usually intended to heap derision upon anyone who experiences the nagging sensation of impending catastrophe, or who would dare to challenge the wisdom of a dodgy decision. As a group they are painted loon-like. This attention grabber uses the derogative term "cult" to undermine the character of participants who feel the need to protest what is an obvious candidate for present and future disaster. This is not a theoretical proposition, the abysmal consequence of  hydraulic fracturing, a process that involve...