Shame on me that I haven't been posting here lately, but actually I was thinking what sort of things people here would find interesting to read about and this was not an easy task. Perhaps I could share with you my ELT readings??

Last weekend I got the IATEFL Aberdeen Selections to read and decided to start at the end - Chapter 10 on Issues in language learning. Mike Sharwood Smith's article entitled 'You can take a horse to the water but you can't make it drink' caught my eye. In his plenary he discussed Krashen's notion of conscious knowledge learning and proposed an alterative way of thinking of language learning which he calls MOGUL - modular on-line growth and use of language. As far as I could understand, MOGUL has a way to explain the relationships between intuitive grammar and metagrammar and the way both develop and interact in the process of language learning. 

Then I moved on to Peter Grundy's short article on pragmatics where he clains that traditional categorical pragmatics - which takes into consideration only deixis, presupposition, speech act and implicature - is not enough to cope with the complex way we see language nowadays, where meaning is fluid and always dependent on context. He believes data driven pragmatics is essential to help us to understand contemporary English since only taking into account things such as figure and ground, membership, procedural and default inference we can really take a closer look at the way people use language.

The very last article in the book is the one on the Hornby Trust panel discussion. Having attended the Hornby scholars' presentation this year I was a bit curious to find out how different the previous one had been. The five areas discussed in Aberdeen were assessment, corpus linguistics, student-centred learning, post-method approaches and reflective practice. In spite of different topics, what didn't change was the fact that all presenters have chosen to investigate issues they considered relevant to their teaching contexts in their countries.

Now I'll move to the beginning of the book. There is a lot there and I confess that I'll have to pick and choose according to my interests. I'll share some articles with you here and I hope you find them interesting as well.

Chris