Failure is a word and a concept that our students often fear. In today’s society, with its focus on success, celebrity, fame and wealth, failure is linked with a sense of not being good enough. But actually, failure is a hugely important part of learning. By failing, we see where
For over a century, students have had opportunities to learn about far off places through pictures brought back by intrepid explorers venturing across the globe. The world learned about the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu through the images of explorer Hiram Bingham and saw the view from Mount Everest after
When I first started teaching English, there were almost no published materials to teach from. I was teaching academically oriented students, and sadly, focusing a lot on grammar and sentence structure because that was the assigned textbook. Today we are all fortunate to have a wealth of excellent materials to
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
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 this series of blog posts Katherine will share a selection of learner centered classroom activities for teachers to try out with their own learners. Each month she will suggest something new to try out in the classroom and provide a simple reflection task to support Professional Development. We invite
In this month’s blog post I want to look at why and how we can use real life topics to engage our teenage students. As teachers and materials writers, I think we can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of language as a set of structures and lexical sets
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 previous post in this series on quick and simple ways to motivate our students, I looked at setting measurable targets for tasks and classroom activities, the idea being that giving students a specific outcome to aim for leads to a sense of achievement. Part of meeting a measurable
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.