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National Geographic Learning: In Focus

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Author: John Hughes

John Hughes is a teacher, teacher trainer and course book author. He currently combines a variety of roles including part-time teaching, running online training courses, and lecturing on ELT methodology at Oxford University. He is an author of many National Geographic Learning titles including Life, a six-level general English course, Spotlight on First, Practical Grammar, Total Business, Success with BEC Vantage, and Aspire. He lives near Oxford, United Kingdom.

Developing confident communicators

10 June 2021 John Hughes Teaching Adults One comment

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

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zoom

How Zoom is making classroom recordings a key part of our teaching

9 July 2020 John Hughes Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens 3 comments

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

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Five practical ideas for starting English lessons with Zoom

4 June 2020 John Hughes Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens, Young Learners 14 comments

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,

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Exploiting video for authentic English

26 May 2020 John Hughes Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens 2 comments

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

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Vox Pops Videos

12 May 2020 John Hughes Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens One comment

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

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A Working Model for Critical Thinking in the ELT Classroom

3 March 2020 John Hughes Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens Leave a comment

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

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creative

7 steps Towards Creative Thinking in the ELT Classroom

4 February 2020 John Hughes Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens 2 comments

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

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Collaborative learning with a kinetic typography video

7 January 2020 John Hughes Teaching Adults Leave a comment

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

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A before/while/after you watch approach to planning a video lesson

11 November 2019 John Hughes Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens 4 comments

In a new series of posts on the subject of using video with language learners, I plan to look at a range of issues relating to this area of English language teaching such as the criteria for selecting video, how different genre of video lend themselves to different task types

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How to motivate learners with visible goals

23 May 2019 John Hughes Teaching Adults Leave a comment

Why do we have goals? As teachers, we are encouraged to have goals for our lessons. Some teachers even write the goals on the board at the beginning of a lesson, so students can see them. For other teachers, their goals (also sometimes called aims) are written at the top

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Bringing the World to the Classroom and the Classroom to Life