10 years ago I posted my first post on this blog.  It was a criticism of people taking the word "literally" too literally. Now, 10 years later, this is my final post.  A lot has changed in ELT in the last 10 years. Learning styles and some of the other weird practices I criticised seem to be on their way out. This would be cause for celebration but I am worried that new whacky ideas have rushed in to fill the gap. I'm not sure that ELT is any more evidence-based now than it was 10 years ago.  A lot has changed for me too. Since starting this blog I have written a book&nb ..read more

In a 2012 post I talked about the famous Pygmalion effect in education which shows that teachers expectations for students alone were enough to influence actual outcomes. It’s a truly amazing finding and minimizes the influence of home life, peer group and IQ. Rosenthal and Jacobson showed that, as I noted, "teachers' attitudes towards their students can affect students in quite remarkable ways". The authors were lauded and their paper has been cited over 12,000 times but there was just one problem, it probably wasn't true.  As I noted in that original post, there were so ..read more

(This post includes video clips that may not show up on mobile devices) The recent hit Netflix show Squid Game has caused controversy online after reports that the translation is not correct.  Podcast host Youngmi Mayer caused a stir when she tweeted out that the English translations of the Netflix show were "botched" and that "if you don’t understand Korean you didn’t really watch the same show". She noted that "zero" of the original dialogue was preserved. So, what happened? How could a huge company like Netflix make such a mess of translating a show like this?  I decided to ..read more

While writing our recent book, an introduction to evidence based ELT, we contemplated writing a chapter on grammar teaching using massed and spaced conditions. Quickly it became clear that this was a rather complicated area and not one with clear findings, and so the chapter didn't make it to the book. This was a shame because there was a lot of interesting research we came across when planning it.  While reading around the subject, one name that kept coming up in the SLA research was John Rogers. So I was delighted when I discovered John's account on twitter and when he ag ..read more

One of the most oft cited claims from SLA research that seemingly everyone agrees on is the idea that there is a set order which students learn grammar. This "internal syllabus" is immune to teaching and thus textbooks which present grammar unit by unit are pointless because students are unable to learn what is taught until they are "ready to acquire" the grammar.  I've often wondered about these claims but until recently didn't have the chance to look at them in any detail. The claims, support by a large number of credible academics; Instruction needs to take into account the le ..read more

Criticism can be hard to take. In the book "kindly Inquisitors" the author relays the story of Georg Cantor a mathematician who "lost his mind because of the hatred and animosity against him and his ideas by his teacher Leopold Kronecker: He was confined to a mental hospital for many years at the end of his life" (296)  Kubota argues that "The field of L2 education by nature attracts professionals who are willing to work with people across racial boundaries, and thus it is considered to be a "nice" field" but is TEFL too nice? Are people guilty of getting too upset about legit ..read more

Why do some people continue to believe that climate change is not real despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it does? One theory is that the people who reject climate change are doing so becuase they are uninformed. This is called the deficit model of knowledge. The idea is that if only they were a bit more educated on science they would suddenly realise the error of their ways.  Researchers have sought to investigate how accurate this view of the world is and the results are surprising. They sought to test the hythosis that lack of knowledge about cliamte change pr ..read more

Sue Leather and Jez Uden have a new book out on the topic of Extensive Reading and Motivation. I was keen to talk to them after looking into research on extensive reading and finding it to be one of the most effective interventions available to teachers. Here we chat about their new book, and some of the benefits of extensive reading.  If you would like to read the book then you can get it from Amazon or directly from the Routledge site ..read more

So, rather unbelievably, I have a book coming out.  In February 2019 I gave a plenary at Ireland ELT. Afterwards, Kirsten Holt of Pavilion said she enjoyed the talk and that someone should really write a book about this kind of thing. Later, at a Pavilion event Kirsten mention the same idea to Carol Lethaby. As it turned out, Carol and I had previously worked together on a couple of papers and Carol and Patti Harries were already working on proposal for a book.  Two years later and the book is finally out to buy!  I think this book is quite different to other book ..read more

While reading for my forthcoming book I came across a lot of lists that authors had put together based on what we could say about teaching from the available evidence. I thought they were interesting but they didn't make it into the book. So here is a list of those lists.  (There are some other interesting lists which are too long to include here. They include Swan's list of things he believes about language teaching and Hattie's list of principles.) Mike Long (2014)  Use task, not text, as the unit of analysis  Promote learning by doing Elaborate input (do not simplify; d ..read more