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
Tag: Critical Thinking
Motivation in your classroom: completion
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
Personalization: Tiny steps at the shallow end or diving in at the deep end
The previous post in this series looked at how personalization in the classroom helps to build rapport, add authenticity and make classroom activities more motivating. It’s an aspect of teaching that is normally seen as beneficial and desirable. However, integrating personalization into your teaching is not without ‘risk’, according to
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
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
Dictation Re-imagined
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
Interview: Dan Barber on Why to Use TED Talks in your ELT Classroom
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?
Six Reasons TED Talks Make Great English Lessons
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
Interview: John Hughes on Visual Literacy in the Language Classroom
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?