This blog post features some personal reflections on teaching English online from Outcomes author, Hugh Dellar. Like many of you out there, I’ve found myself doing a fair bit of online teaching recently and I won’t lie – I much prefer face-to-face. I miss the way I can read a room full
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.
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
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
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
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
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
The earliest grammars of English were, for obvious reasons, based on written models of the language. In the absence of any way to record everyday speech, written texts provided a solid base upon which scholarly works could be built. In addition, both grammarians and lexicographers frequently had a deep mistrust