Many moons ago when I was learning French at school, our teacher always insisted on doing dictations. He absolutely loved them, and yes, you guessed it, we hated them. Apart from anything else they were boring and repetitive and we didn’t really see the point in them. So imagine my
Students love music, and they love doing songs in class. It’s small wonder then that coursebooks are incorporating songs or offering songs on supplementary photocopiable material. However, these are rarely the songs that students want to listen to. Students are far more motivated when the songs they do in class
Welcome to the first in our series of posts on activities for short courses – Ice-Breakers for the ELT Classroom! Join us over the coming weeks for posts on various activity ideas – from grammar games to projects and songs! It’s that time of year again when students are coming
Listen to our interview with Dan Barber talking about how TED Talks really do make good English lessons and download Dan’s FREE lesson plan around Rana el Kaliouby’s TED Talk on an app that can read your emotions! Have you read Dan’s article here?
TED became popular around the same time as Twitter, so it may come as a surprise to the millions of enthusiastic fans to meet people who haven’t heard of it. TED Talks aren’t quite as ubiquitous as funny-cat videos but they provide an intelligent balance to that more frivolous side
Listen to Hugh Dellar talk about his thoughts on spoken English, how YouTube can actually be useful in English language teaching, and how it’s OK to let your students speak at a higher level! Have you read Hugh’s article?
The earliest grammars of English were, for obvious reasons, based on written models of the language. In the absence of any way to record everyday speech, written texts provided a solid base upon which scholarly works could be built. In addition, both grammarians and lexicographers frequently had a deep mistrust
Listen to Tom Fast explain in more detail his guiding principles for teaching English and the three things he’s learned as a teacher! Have you read Tom’s article?
In 2014, I started writing a textbook with National Geographic Learning that was part of a series for teens. For six months, before any writing took place, our team of authors and editors conducted lengthy discussions on the content and methodologies that would go into the books. This gave me
Listen to author John Hughes discuss how an understanding of visual literacy can help teachers make effective use of images in the English classroom and students decipher visuals in English. Have you read John’s article on the subject?