In this post, National Geographic Learning author John Hughes reflects on his experience traveling to Peru’s Boiling River and shares what learning and working in an interdisciplinary environment taught him about English language education.
Author: John Hughes
John Hughes is an award-winning ELT author with over thirty years’ experience of teaching and teacher training. He has worked with learners and teachers from all over the world and is a well-known conference presenter. For National Geographic Learning, he is an author on the course series Pathways, Third Edition; Life, Third Edition; World English, Third Edition; World Link, Fourth Edition; Success with Business, and Total Business. He’s also co-author of the methodology title, Critical Thinking in ELT. Currently, he is specializing in materials writing training at www.writingeltmaterials.com.
Creating Pathways Between Academic and Employability Skills
If you already have experience teaching English to college and university-aged students, you’ll understand that we can develop their academic skills alongside their language skills. Note-taking, listening to lectures, research skills, and giving presentations are all skills needed to operate in a demanding educational environment. But is it enough to
Developing confident communicators
What makes a confident English communicator? Is it always a student with a very advanced level of English? Not necessarily. I have worked with students who have a low intermediate level of English but who can communicate very effectively only using the English they know. On the other hand, I
How Zoom is making classroom recordings a key part of our teaching
In traditional face-to-face teaching, there have always been lots of benefits to recording students in class. For example, if you make an audio recording of a role play conversation, then the two students can listen back. Or a student can make a video recording of their presentation, watch it back
Five practical ideas for starting English lessons with Zoom
Like so many teachers, I recently started delivering my English lessons on Zoom. On reflection, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that so many of the things I do in a normal face-to-face lesson are easily transferable to a platform like Zoom. I can present language by screensharing or using the whiteboard,
Exploiting video for authentic English
So far in this series of articles on using video in the classroom, I’ve focused on ways to plan a video lesson and how to make the activities more collaborative. In this post, I’d like to look at the impact authentic video can have on a lesson when we teach
Vox Pops Videos
The term ‘Vox Pops’ comes from the Latin meaning ‘voice of the people’ but in modern day English we use it to refer to videos made from short clips of everyday people being interviewed. It’s one of my favorite type of videos to include with course books because I like
A Working Model for Critical Thinking in the ELT Classroom
In the article on the topic of Critical Thinking in ELT, my co-author Paul Dummett suggested that critical thinking in English language teaching should involve more than simply identifying fact from misinformation or searching texts for supporting evidence. We argue instead that critical thinking is more encompassing and should be viewed
7 steps Towards Creative Thinking in the ELT Classroom
Creativity and creative thinking are generally viewed as positive elements in a classroom. When students are being creative, we assume they are having fun, they are motivated and they are using language in a way which will be memorable to them. Similarly, when we describe a colleague as ‘creative’, it’s
Collaborative learning with a kinetic typography video
In my previous post, I looked at one way to plan an entire lesson around a video by using a before/while/after-you-watch structure. It’s a reliable structure which allows a teacher to plan a series of exercises with almost any type of video. However, one of the most common problems I