These productive skills which require students to ‘perform’ can be the most challenging to assess because in many ways the assessment is always subjective. When we listen or read the students’ responses, we can wonder ‘What exactly is good pronunciation?’ or ‘What is a good answer to the task?’. This
Each month in this new blog post series, Katherine offers five practical and engaging classroom activities which all use the same photo as a starting point. The ideas can be adapted to work with all ages and levels and are designed to recycle language in an engaging way while developing
Flipped learning has not only been gaining popularity rapidly in recent years, but it has also become one of the biggest trends in classroom teaching. While having students be actively involved in their own learning, flipped learning can also lead to dramatic improvements in students’ academic performance (Talbert, 2017). Moreover,
Will you be at the TESOL 2019 convention in Atlanta, Georgia from March 12th-March 15th? We are thrilled to be sponsoring the opening keynote speaker, Dr. David Harrison. Dr. Harrison is an anthropologist, linguist, National Geographic Fellow and co-director of the Society’s Enduring Voices Project. If you’re attending TESOL, be sure
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
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
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
In this blog post, Katherine writes about think, pair, share, a learning strategy that can be easily incorporated into classroom practice as a way of structuring learners’ approach to a task. She explains what think, pair, share is and why it can be useful. She then shares a step-by-step guide to
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
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