This may have happened to you, too. You are in a desperate hurry to get on with something and your friend, sister, husband or boss, start rabbiting on about completely unconnected things, like details of the traffic, the clothes someone wore or his relationships etc. You think: “Get to the point!!!” Watch this experiment – theContinueContinue reading “R is for Relevance”
Author Archives: Marisa Constantinides
G is for Grice’s Cooperative Principle
Image fron canva.com Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle, proposed in his 1975 William James Lectures, outlines how people generally cooperate in conversation to achieve mutual understanding. Grice suggested that participants in a conversation implicitly agree to cooperate with one another, aiming to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear. This underlying agreement, or “Cooperative Principle,” is elaboratedContinueContinue reading “G is for Grice’s Cooperative Principle”
Learning and/with AI
The rapid advancement of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek undeniably raises important questions about university education and assessment. However, the proposed solution of reverting to traditional, invigilated, pen-and-paper exams and placing the responsibility on students to use AI “judiciously and responsibly” fails to address the deeper, structural challenges at play. Instead ofContinueContinue reading “Learning and/with AI”
V is for Vocabulary Acquisition
Vocabulary Acquisition Learning vocabulary in large quantities remains a problem in the second or foreign language classroom. The advice on how many words to teach in each lesson varies, from 5 to 10 or 12. Yet, students need masses and masses of it to make progress – it’s not the grammar that makes theContinueContinue reading “V is for Vocabulary Acquisition”
Task Based Language Teaching or Lexical Approach?
Task Based Language Teaching is a topic discussed on all TEFL courses and, especially on the Cambridge DELTA course, we expect to see it in action, at least beyond the beginner level. I have taken the liberty of copy-pasting the site introduction to the site which is not visible from the front page of theContinueContinue reading “Task Based Language Teaching or Lexical Approach?”