Traditionally, ELT listening lessons often focused on micro-skills like using context and general knowledge to get the gist. More recently, there has been a reconsideration of listening and how we might improve it, based on four main processes. These can be described as: In this post, we define these four
Critical thinking is seen as an increasingly valued skill to teach students in the 21st Century, but the first thing we need to ask is what exactly is it? Very often critical thinking can become a complaint that people aren’t thinking like me! Some definitions have a focus on being
Many coursebooks provide word lists of ‘new’ words that appear in the unit. Sometimes these are with a translation and they may also have an example or phonetic forms. The word list is an obvious resource for repetition. I don’t use the word ‘review’ here, because that implies that we
Repetition has got itself a rather bad name over the years and it is often avoided in many course materials. Why is this the case? Well, one reason may be purely economic. Drills mean a lot of recording and/or space on the page which makes for an expensive book. Similarly, repetition of
Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley explore questions about vocabulary that give you more feedback from your learners. Perhaps the most common kind of question that many teachers learn to ask during initial training is Concept-Checking Questions (CCQs). The basic idea is that after explaining what something means, teachers need to