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Author: Lewis Lansford

Lewis got his first taste of teaching English in Barcelona in the late 1980s. The experience inspired him to get a Master’s in TESOL, after which he taught at a university language center in Arizona and then a manufacturing company in Japan. In 1995, he took an editorial job with a major publisher in Hong Kong developing materials for Asia, and in 1997 became a freelance editor, project manager and writer in the UK. He has worked on books, videos, tests, audio materials, worksheets, apps and online materials for English learners of all ages across the world. Lewis is an author for National Geographic Learning's Keynote and Perspectives series.

Role models: A vision for the future

20 January 2022 Lewis Lansford Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens Leave a comment

I met Dean and Emma and their then-two-year-old daughter Liz (not their real names) in 1992 and we’ve been good friends ever since. When I first started socializing with them, I was struck by how comfortable they were as parents and how well they integrated their young child into their

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How to Teach about Culture in the Twenty-first Century

9 October 2019 Lewis Lansford Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens 6 comments

When I started teaching English in the 1980s, the “culture” in ELT tended to focus on the cultures of two specific countries: The USA and the UK. In London, you had red double-decker buses and in New York, you had the subway. British people ate fish and chips, Americans preferred

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TED Talks can make technical language accessible – try it!

14 June 2018 Lewis Lansford Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens Leave a comment

One great thing about TED Talks is that they cover a huge variety of interesting topics – big ideas that will engage both you and your learners. But sometimes, they can be fairly technical. Some teachers hesitate to bring technical material into the classroom because they feel they don’t have

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Choose the perfect TED Talk for your students’ needs-try it!

14 February 2018 Lewis Lansford Teaching Teens 2 comments

According to the internet, video is processed 60,000 faster than text – an amazing, but seemingly unfounded claim repeated over and over online. Still, the old proverb A picture’s worth a thousand words isn’t wrong, and as teachers, we understand that one of the great things about video is the

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Talk

You can use a TED Talk without looking at the picture – try it!

21 December 2017 Lewis Lansford Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens 4 comments

In my previous post, I wrote about playing TED Talks without the sound as a simple hack to control language level. But what happens if we leave the sound on and turn off the pictures? Does that have the opposite effect and raise the level of the input? Not necessarily.

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sound

You can use a TED talk without the sound – try it!

23 October 2017 Lewis Lansford Teaching Adults, Teaching Teens One comment

A simple hack to control language level In the first post of this blog series TED Talks work for all levels: Try it!, I talked about how TED Talks can be used in the classroom for students at any level, as long as the activities that support them are level-appropriate.

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Ted for all levels

TED Talks work for all levels – try it!

13 September 2017 Lewis Lansford Teaching Teens 5 comments

What’s the best level for introducing TED Talks? All levels, including beginners. Teachers and learners love TED Talks because they feature big, fascinating ideas that learners want to talk about.  And with the right TED Talk, one that offers a big idea and the opportunity for students to learn and

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Bringing the World to the Classroom and the Classroom to Life