In his monthly blog, National Geographic Learning’s in-house teacher trainer Alex Warren explores what’s going on in the world of ELT on his travels around the region. —- It’s no coincidence that no matter where you are in the world, teachers face exactly the same problems. I’ve spoken with teachers
Category: Teaching Teens
How To Get your Students Speaking in Class
How can we get our learners talking? A combination of factors can often inhibit our students from speaking out loud – fear of making mistakes in front of their peers; not knowing what to say; not feeling motivated or interested in the topic. If we want to engage our students
Personalizing Culture
If you’re familiar with materials from National Geographic Learning you’ll know that they include a lot of images, texts, and topics about people and places from different countries. For this reason, you can often use the cross-cultural aspects of the material to help your students build their intercultural awareness alongside
Repetition and word lists
Many coursebooks provide word lists of ‘new’ words that appear in the unit. Sometimes these are with a translation and they may also have an example or phonetic forms. The word list is an obvious resource for repetition. I don’t use the word ‘review’ here, because that implies that we
8 Tactics for using Technology in the Classroom
A few years ago, I was doing a session on technology in the classroom with a group of teachers and I noticed there was a clear split between them. There were those embracing it and seeing it as a powerful addition to their teaching practice and then there were those
Voices: Life as Lived in China
Learn about the trip National Geographic photographers Ami Vitale and John Stanmeyer’s took to China, to record everyday life as part of the National Geographic Learning Life as Lived Photographic Expedition. The goal of the Life as Lived project is to commission content with which to illustrate the education materials
Voices from the Field: Songs in the ELT Classroom
In his monthly blog, National Geographic Learning’s in-house teacher trainer Alex Warren explores what’s going on in the world of ELT on his travels around the region. October has been another busy month, of teacher training with another few thousand air miles under the belt. Malta (twice), Holland, England, and
Flipped Learning in the ELT Classroom
In this blog, National Geographic Learning’s Alex Warren, explores what exactly the flipped classroom is and what benefits it can bring to English language classroom. Having looked at blended learning in my previous blog post, I thought that it would be worthwhile looking at a form of blended learning that
Life around the World Contest Continues
Welcome back to the Life around the World contest! The last post showed fish swim in the South Pacific off the popular holiday island of Bora Bora in French Polynesia. Surrounded by a lagoon and a coral reef, Bora Bora is famous for its overwater bungalows with glass floors that provide a
In praise of repetition
Repetition has got itself a rather bad name over the years and it is often avoided in many course materials. Why is this the case? Well, one reason may be purely economic. Drills mean a lot of recording and/or space on the page which makes for an expensive book. Similarly, repetition of