Skip to main content

ELT Research Bites



If you have an interest in research into second language acquisition but don't have the time, money or need to look at original journal articles, you may like this very good site which contains articles about notable research issues in the field. ELT Research Bites.

In their own words:

"The purpose of ELT Research Bites is to present interesting and relevant language and education research in an easily digestible format. Academic journal articles and research reports tend to be long, perhaps even long-winded. And rightfully so – there is a lot of theoretical and often statistical work that must be clearly explained and a journal article is the best place for that. We hope, with this new blog, to help all language teachers benefit from the insights gained through academic research, whilst not taking too much of their time away from where it is needed most – the classroom.

ELT Research Bites serves you the substance and context of the full article at the length of an abstract, with a side dish of practical implications! With these bite-size summaries of applied linguistics and pedagogy research, ELT Research Bites aims to offer a bridge to empirical or other published work which contributors feels deserve attention and which you can adapt and apply in your own language teaching!"

The site is written by a group of ELT teachers and researchers led by Anthony Schmidt and is regularly updated with very readable digests of pedagogical and theoretical topics.

Recent articles have included:
  • Foreign language educators exposure to research
  • Instructed second language learning, Implicit learning and input enhancement - a summary of some work done by leading researcher Michael Long
  • Pronunciation instruction - worth the time or wasted effort?
  • Gap-fill, sentence-writing or composition - which leads to better vocab learning?
  • Written feedback - does it work?
  • Cognitive load and language teaching - what teachers need to know
  • Is flipped learning worth the trouble?
The site also links to a range of free, open-access journals and invites contributions from other writers. Topics can be searched from a side bar.

What I like about the posts is their clarity and balanced content. Although the writers are from an English language Teaching background, as always, much of what they write is relevant to MFL (WL) teachers. Sites like this provide play an invaluable role in making research accessible and digestible to practising language teachers. You can learn a lot here.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,