Current trends in ELT (UK) Around 25 years ago, when I worked at International House London, I used to teach a course called ‘Current Trends in ELT’. I no longer have records of the time so I can’t be 100% sure what was included in the course, but task-based learning, the ‘Lexical Approach’, the use of corpora, English as a Lingua Franca, learner autonomy / centredness, reflective practice and technology (CALL and CD-ROMs) were all probably part of it. I see that IH London still offers this course (next available course in January 2021) and I am struck by how similar the list of contents is.
Blog IATEFL Slovenia 2016 photos A few shots taken during the 23rd IATEFL Slovenia conference, held in Terme Topolšica on 3 to 6 March read more How we work now (How we teach now) I read an article from Guardian Weekend with excerpts from a few ‘secret office diaries’ – here’s my take from an ESOL teacher perspective read more
Pocket: The Pinterest alternative for saving everything you want, privately. If you’ve become more of a news junkie over the past year like I have, you’ve probably realized that your standard browser bookmark bar isn’t necessarily your best best for saving articles you want to come back to. Let alone recipes you want to remember, gifts you want to buy, YouTube videos you want to see…you get the picture. Enter Pocket. This brilliant, simple, very intuitive bookmarking service has replaced del.icio.us –and even Pinterest in its former glory (RIP) — for me. It lets me quickly bookmark pretty much everything, all directly from the web or even social media, and save it in one place. 5 Hacks for “Taskifying” the Coursebook After a bit of a longer COVID chaos-enforced hiatus than I would have liked, this guest post is from Neil Anderson. It is a little longer than most posts here – but we will excuse that given the the wealth of knowledge and useful insights into incorporating more of a task-based approach into our lessons. In all honesty, his blog (co-written with Neil McCutcheon) has saved me hours in lesson planning and is one of the few that offers lessons that I don’t feel the need to tweak!
it's NOT about what the teacher does with technology Bruce Springsteen: "When we kiss…" Not just going through the motions! You could probably say I've had four different though overlapping careers — in language teaching, language teacher training, technology and ELT management. The first of those I retired from (after 35+ years) a few months ago, though the number of contact hours I was doing was limited; teacher training I'm retiring from at the end of this month; management I got fired from (to the relief of all involved!) many years ago; which leaves only another 10 or so years in technology to do (I'm only (?)
The Pinterest Guide For Teachers How Does Pinterest Work? Pinterest allows its members to create a board on virtually any topic and pin images to that board. Other members, called pinners, are able to follow a board and repin any images they find interesting onto their own boards. What happens after the story? – Cécile Lainé As a teacher who loves using Story Listening and Reading to facilitate language acquisition, the question I get asked the most is: “What happens after the story?” I am excited to provide a response in this post. Ready? Nothing has to happen after the story. The heart of Story Listening and Reading is that the story itself, if compelling and comprehensible, is enough.
Leoxicon: About me I’ve been involved in ELT for more than 12 years in all sorts of roles: teacher, examiner, teacher trainer, senior teacher and materials developer – mainly with the British Council in Tel Aviv but also Cyprus and Turkey. In recent years, teacher training missions have taken me to Azerbaijan, Armenia and other countries in the region where I had a chance to meet, work with and learn from some wonderful and dedicated teachers and teacher trainers. Currently I am a lecturer giving courses to pre-service and in-service teachers in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), teaching methodology, vocabulary teaching and using technology in the classroom (the latter by demand rather than by choice). My other interests – as you can tell from the contents of this blog – include corpus linguistics, lexical approaches to language teaching and using video in the classroom – the topics I’ve written articles and materials on for the British Council and BBC’s TeachingEnglish website.
6 reasons to use Pearltrees Pearltrees is the first and largest social curation community on the Internet. It’s a place to organize, discover and share all the cool content you find online. However, beyond this basic definition, a question remains: why would I want to use Pearltrees? Well, what I want to share with you are six major use cases (or reasons) we’ve identified as being most popular across our entire community of web curators. Psychology for Educators [And More] Research Findings on Studying Effectively Six Key Principles: As teachers, our job is to help students study English more effectively. And generally, we are good at it. We know which language forms they should study first, which vocabulary items they should focus on, etc. But what about studying in general?
5 Good Teaching Habits As teachers and learners, we all expect different things from learning and teaching. Some learners expect language-heavy courses, full of grammar and with lots of teacher explanation. Others anticipate a more social learning approach, where they play with the language and acquire it through practice, practice and practice.