The state of stative verbs

or why I've stopped teaching them (and why you shouldn't bother with them either) Photo by Emma Newman Segev via ELTpics on Flickr ...

Powerful tea and other (im)possible collocations

Photo by Christina Martidou via ELTpics on Flickr How do you explain the notion of collocation to your students?  Apart from using this gre...

On (and off) the wall vocabulary activities

I often make students (and teachers I work with) get out of their seats. I think movement in the classroom is important whether you believe ...

To confer or to concur?

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...

We are lexically indebted to him

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 o...

What corpora HAVE done for us

Sinclair's seminal work - the bible of corpus linguistics In this post I would like to defend linguistic corpora and their relevance to ...