Teenage students have a famously short attention span, and with plenty of other distractions around them, you need to get them hooked as soon as they walk into the classroom. That’s why I often say that a lesson can be ‘won or lost’ in the first five minutes. In this
Projects for Young Learners
Why use projects in your young leaner English classroom? Learning with projects is experiential learning and learning which motivates children, since they get to do what they like and get to avoid what they don’t like. Don’t we wish that all learning would be like that? For us, as well?
Making Learning Last: Stories and imagery
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
Personalization in the ELT Classroom
Why do we assume personalization is good for language learning? The idea of ‘personalizing’ language learning naturally has positive connotations; after all, an ‘impersonal classroom’ doesn’t sound like a very pleasant place to be! But in what ways does personalization actually enhance learning? Primarily, personalization in the classroom can lead
TED Talks work for all levels – try it!
What’s the best level for introducing TED Talks? All levels, including beginners. Teachers and learners love TED Talks because they feature big, fascinating ideas that learners want to talk about. And with the right TED Talk, one that offers a big idea and the opportunity for students to learn and
It’s Good to (TED) Talk
If I told you that TED Talks started in the same year that one pound notes were taken out of circulation, Virgin Atlantic had its maiden flight, Michael Jackson released Thriller, and Ghostbusters, Gremlins and The Karate Kid were some of the year’s biggest films, what would you think? TED
How to Maximise Audio Scripts
Here’s a question for you. How often do you use the listening scripts in the back of the book for follow-up work or additional activities? Be honest! Now, I’m going to guess most of you are thinking ‘not often’, and you wouldn’t be alone. From my experience of doing countless
Recycled Readings
Nowadays most course books come with the reading texts available in Word format either online or on the teacher’s resource CD-ROM. These are a great resource, but from my experience teachers rarely take advantage of these, which is a shame as there’s so much you can do with them and,
4 Vocabulary Games for your Classroom
Last week we looked at different easy to prepare grammar games, but when it comes to games vocabulary comes out king – there are literally hundreds of different vocabulary games out there. In this blog we’ll look at some of my favourites, but before we do that I want to
Games to Make Grammar Fun
Any teacher knows students like to have fun, both inside and outside the classroom. And so we have to bear this in mind when planning our classes – lessons need to be fun. As Plato famously said nearly two and half thousand years ago, “Do not train children to learning