Here's a little test for you to see how good you are at spotting collocations. The words in the grid below can be put into four collocation groups. Can you figure out (a) what the groups are? (b) which word(s)... Continue Reading →
There's a new twitter based application on the web that you don't have to sign up to twitter to use: Tweetolife. The software is one of the outcomes of a study carried out by researchers at the Language, Interaction and... Continue Reading →
A relatively simple way of dealing with multiple choice cloze tasks in the classroom: Take one multiple choice cloze task, possibly one like this FCE style task found via a google image search, or just one from your coursebook. Before... Continue Reading →
The visual thesaurus was pointed out to me some time ago as a great alternative to the standard online dictionary search, and also as a great way to help learners broaden their vocabulary, particularly with higher level students who have... Continue Reading →
This website has the potential to be an invaluable online teaching tool and is worth checking out! I only came across this the other day, but they've been around for a while and further research reveals that Larry Ferlazzo mentions this... Continue Reading →
What to do with all those words? One of the gripes I have with course books is the often seemingly random presentation of vocabulary sets where the target items appear in a little box in one corner of the page,... Continue Reading →
Yep, hot on the heels of yesterday's post on collocation trees, another activity to see how many collocations your learners can identify and to help them see a little bit better why a collocation is... well... a collocation. Collocation Pyramids!... Continue Reading →
"Teacher, what's a collocation?" "Well, they're sort of words that go together." "Teacher, I don't understand." "Well, you know the expression 'heavy traffic'? Well, traffic's not really heavy is it? I mean, it can be, but... erm.... Collocations are just... Continue Reading →
