Feb 14, 2025 Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Teaching lexically, Uncategorized English language coursebooks are a guide … but what are they showing you? In a recent post on LinkedIn, Katherine Bilsborough asked for opinions from English language teachers who were anti-coursebook explaining why they were against using them. As it turned out, most of the comments weren’t really anti-coursebook at all – maybe because they were from people connected to Kath, who is after all … a coursebook […]
Nov 14, 2024 Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Exploiting Exercises, Pronunciation Dictation and decoding A long time ago I did a Diploma in TEFL and I remember a particular piece of feedback I was given after one of my observed lessons. In this lesson, I’d dictated a series of words to the students. Now, I can’t remember exactly what those words were or why I was dictating them, but […]
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 […]
Mar 9, 2015 Core Principles, Resources 4 Language is patterned We have already see that one problem with the grammar + words view of language is that words are difficult to define, but the same could equally said of grammar on its own. In the case of Pinker’s book, Words and Rules, grammar is very narrowly defined as basically the rules of morphology (adding -ed […]
Feb 20, 2015 Core Principles 3 Language is norm orientated This use of the word norms here is inspired by Patrick Hanks’ recent book, Norms and Exploitations. It’s just the latest in a large number of articles, books and theories which have tried to account for the fact that despite an infinite number of possible sentences based on a limited set of innate grammar rules […]
