Humor4u

Image by @sandymillin via eltpics on Flickr For the first time since it was last held in Harrogate (2010), I didn’t go to the annual IATEFL conference this year and - like thousands of other English teachers who couldn’t afford to go to the largest EFL conference in the world - settled in comfortably in front of my computer to watch it online. All plenary talks and selected presentations are streamed live on the IATEFL online website thanks to the partnership between IATEFL and the British Council. I was particularly looking forward to the talks by Prof Michael Hoey on 4 April ( "Old approaches, new perspectives" - click HERE to watch the recording) and Prof Sugata Mitra on 5 April ( "The future of learning"- click HERE for the recording) and highly recommended them to all my students (teacher candidates). With Prof M. Hoey at the Lexical Conference in London, May 2013 (Photo by Ela Wassel) Michael Hoey's theory of lexical priming, which grew out of his work...

If only post hoc analyses always brought out the inner skeptic in us all! Or came with red flashing lights instead of just a little token "caution" sentence buried somewhere.  Post hoc analysis is when researchers go looking for patterns in data. (Post hoc is Latin for "after this.") Testing for statistically significant associations is not by itself a way to sort out the true from the false. (More about that  here .) Still, many treat it as though it is - especially when they haven't been able to find a "significant" association, and turn to the bathwater to look for unexpected babies. Even when researchers know the scientific rules and limitations, funny things happen along the way to a final research report. It's the problem of  researchers' degrees of freedom : there's a lot of opportunity for picking and choosing, and changing horses mid-race. Researchers can succumb to the temptation of over-interpreting the value of what they'r...

In an earnest attempt to reach more people (or perhaps a desperate attempt to build up a larger audience) I though it would be good to post this reference to the existing five (5) episodes of the podcast that Tor Norbye  and I have been working on for the past several weeks. And by "working on," I mean we get together every 2-4 weeks, sit down with someone interesting on one of the Android development teams and talk about technology and APIs that interest us, and then let someone else figure out the tedious details of actually recording and posting the results. So it's not really work as much as work- related . The goal of the podcast from the beginning was to have conversations with engineers and teams that listeners might not otherwise know and to talk about details of features and functionality of the Android platform that might not be obvious from simply reading the documentation. Because, hey, who reads the docs anyway, right? So far we've released five (5!) epi...

Photo by Tzvi Meller As much as it seems counter-intuitive, teaching new vocabulary in semantic sets (e.g. jobs: doctor, teacher, lawyer etc. or colours: red, blue, yellow  etc.) does not facilitate learning. As far back as in the 1990s, research showed that teaching semantically related items is counter-productive . Have these findings been taken on board? Of course not! New vocabulary in elementary level coursebooks is routinely presented in lists of semantically related items. Semantic sets and interference In 1993, Thomas Tinkham investigated the effect of learning new words under two conditions. One group received a list of words belonging to the same semantic set while the other was given random, semantically unrelated words. Tinkham revealed that list-learning of unrelated words yielded better results as the second group performed significantly better when they were asked to recalled the target words. A few years later, Rob Waring (1997) replicated the experiment with two gr...

Images by Tim Evanson ,   Gene  Hunt &  Alex Alishevskikh  via Flickr As usual, as a follow up to the traditional end-of-year news quiz, here are language-focused activities aimed at reviewing and consolidating lexis from quiz. If you haven't seen the news quiz 2013, click HERE This is how I usually use the quiz with my students. Please note the quiz and the activities below come in two levels. Lesson 1 : (first lesson of a new year) Students answer the questions the quiz. Optionally, I may give out the correct answers. We highlight interesting chunks of language (see the teachers' notes that accompany the quiz) Lesson 2 : Students' mini-presentations on the news stories they chose in Lesson 1 OR the ones they didn't know the answers to. Vocabulary review and practice 1. (available in two levels) Lesson 3 : Vocabulary review and practice 2 (available in two levels) Scroll all the way down for the teachers' notes for the vocabulary activities for both levels. ...

Traditional quiz for your first lesson in 2014 By lasanta.com.ec  via Flickr [CC BY 2.0] For some reason I had a hard time coming up with news items for this year's quiz. Not that the year was uneventful but somehow there were no sex scandals, jumps from space or viral videos which usually make good questions for the quiz. There were lots of deaths though, which is reflected in the questions, and while we're on the topic I'd like to mention that our field has also lost three notable figures in 2013: Leo Van Lier, Earl Stevick and Dave Willis (see my tribute  HERE ) Anyhow, as in the past, the quiz comes in two versions: the upper level version is suitable for upper-intermediate/advanced level students (B2 +) and the easier, lower level version for lower intermediate students (B1 -). The detailed 7-page teachers notes (scroll all the way down) provide ideas on how to use the quiz with your students and how to explore the language from the quiz. In a few days, as usual, I wil...

"Early." It's one of those words like "new" and "fast," isn't it? As though they are inherently good, and their opposites - "late," "old" and "slow" - are somehow bad. Believing in the value and virtue of being an early bird has deep roots in our cultural consciousness. It goes back at least as far as ancient Athens. Aristotle's  treatise on household economics  said that early rising was both virtuous and beneficial: "It is likewise well to rise before daybreak; for this contributes to health, wealth and wisdom." But just as Gertrud came to suspect the benefits for her of being early weren't all they were cracked up to be, earliness isn't always better in other areas either. The "get in early!" assumption has an in-built tendency to lead us astray when it comes to detection of diseases and conditions. And even most physicians - just the people we often rely on to inform us - don't...