As a teacher, do you ever have that feeling of mild panic that you’ve gone in too high with a text? I certainly have. Oh, no, you think, the students are out of their depth here. Should I abandon this or persevere and hope we get through it somehow? You
This blog post is a follow-up to a webinar I gave a few weeks ago. The webinar addressed this question: How do we avoid overwhelming our learners when we present them with new topics and information-rich texts and then ask them to discuss and analyze them in a meaningful way?
After years of talking and writing about critical thinking (CT) and of reading and listening to others do the same, my colleague John Hughes and I decided that we should codify our thoughts on the subject. What came out of it two years later was Critical Thinking in ELT: a practical
The previous blog about the climate change debate looked at teaching ideas for higher levels, focusing on a) the words we need to talk about climate change b) the way people feel about it and c) constructive ideas for dealing with it. In this post, I want to suggest activities
As a classroom debate topic or an essay subject, climate change sometimes seems a bit overdone. In fact, is it even a debate anymore? Practically everyone now agrees that global warming is happening and humans are contributing to it. So, we tend to avoid talking about it – either from
You may be asking why a whole post is devoted to the subject of multi-sensory learning when the other posts in this series have included two or three factors that influence memory. The answer is because multi-sensory learning really implies experiential learning, which accounts for much of what we learn
As many teachers who use ELT titles from National Geographic Learning will be aware, critical thinking is a key feature of the materials and informs our approach to English Language teaching. Now, Life authors Paul Dummett and John Hughes are carrying out research into how critical thinking is applied and
In the last post on memorization, I talked about the role of emotion, stories and personalization. All of these things gave language a better chance of reaching longer-term memory because of their impact on the student – the way they resonated with them on a deeper level. In this post I
In my last blog post, we looked at the effectiveness of images and stories in helping to make learning more memorable. In this post I want to look at the role of emotion – both in the learning environment in general and in the content that we include in our
Do you ever feel frustrated that your students can’t hang on to what you’ve taught them? Actually, about 70% of what we forget is forgotten in the first 24 hours after learning. That may help to explain why our students, who seem so good at using a particular grammatical structure