National Geographic Learning: In Focus
Bringing the world to the classroom and the classroom to life
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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