Apr 18, 2016 Opinions, The state of our profession CELTA, the native-speaker bias and possible paths forward Last week at IATEFL, Silvana Richardson delivered a rousing, righteous plenary tracing the historical roots of – and critiquing – the institutionalised mechanisms and habits of mind that continue to privilege native=speaker teachers over non-natives. The talk can be viewed online and speaks for itself, so suffice it to say that it was a powerful […]
Jul 2, 2015 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: What time…? Now, some of you may have been thinking that ‘chunk of the day’ had turned into ‘chunk of the month’ – or even ‘chunk of the year’! I’m afraid we’ve been a bit busy and perhaps a bit depressed by how in the run up to the election has turned into the aftermath of the election. You […]
Jul 1, 2015 Exploiting Exercises, Resources When are questions and teacher talk too much? We recently had a query from a reader regarding the kind of language-generating concept questions we advocate. Basically, he had received some criticism after a lesson observation that the class was too teacher-centred, too input heavy and students didn’t have enough time for output (aka – practice or production). There is no doubt that asking concept checks […]
Jun 14, 2015 Lexis, Opinions Everything you ever wanted to know about snowclones, but were afraid to ask. Several years ago now, I wrote a conference talk entitled – rather wittily, I felt – What have corpora ever done for us? In retrospect, I now realise it’s quite probable that the fact its title and much of its rhetorical framework were borrowed from a famous Monty Python sketch was lost on many who […]
May 24, 2015 Core Principles, Resources 5 Different collocations or units of meaning = different networks of words We saw in the second post in this series that coming up with clear-cut definitions of single words is difficult because individual words impact on each other and change their ‘meanings’ slightly. For example, Hanks argues that the typical usage of raging fire is different to blazing fire in that it can be seen to be a both different […]
