It’s kind of sad to look back on my early career and realize that I spent more than my fair share of years mispronouncing all sorts of common words without ever being corrected. I’m not talking about oddities such as quay (ki) or gauge (ei). It’s really the everyday subtleties (baSic or baZic?) that I wish …
Ugly title, I know, but the post is short and worth reading. Bear with me for a few lines.
For this article to make sense to you, you need to agree with three basic premises: 1. Language learning can be regarded as a form of skill learning. 2. Controlled practice has a role to play as a sort of rehearsal, so to speak, for real-life communication down the road. 3. This rehearsal should bear …
There’s just no escaping gap-fill exercises for controlled practice (I’m using activity, exercise and task interchangeably in this post). When Headway came along in the mid 80s and grammar made its humongous comeback, gap-filling was catapulted back into ELT limelight and, since then, has pervaded every crevice of our profession, for both the right and …