Who: Teacher and teacher trainer (University of Westminster); co-author with Andrew Walkley of Outcomes and Innovations and of Teaching Lexically (Delta Publishing). Mentored by Michael Lewis and Jimmie Hill. CTEFLA, DTEFLA, MA TESOL.
What: “Thoughts, rants and ramblings…”, including the 2013 Twenty things in twenty years series and a Dogme/coursebook series. Closed January 2015; blogging continued at Lexical Lab.
Stance: Language is “at heart lexically driven”. He critiques PPP, tense-syllabus grammar and recipe methodology, and makes a theory-first argument from corpora and priming (Hoey). He is pragmatic about coursebooks (as an author of them) and about Dogme (a middle ground).
Read critically: Polemical; key claims are often uncited.
Processed notes
- Ambient language - exploit coursebook exercises beyond the targets
- Grammar should be taught through lexis, not PPP rules
- Most errors are priming gaps, not grammar gaps
- Nothing is as practical as a good theory
- Round-ups, gapped boardwork and reformulation
Next to process
- Input is more important than output
- Opening the heavens: reformulation
- Lexical Lab blog (successor site)