It is easy enough to get stuck in your classroom, and stuck in particular ways of thinking about your teaching and your learners and even of course - yourself! Cambridge English have just launched what look like an interesting professional development... Continue Reading →
In my recent talk at IATEFL 2015, I argued that the standard approach to reading in ELT is ineffective and that tasks which reflect a broader range of genres and more realistic reasons for reading are preferable, and I demonstrated... Continue Reading →
Dear David, It's been almost fifteen years since you started teaching. In fact I think at this point back in 2002 you were busy trying to complete the IH London CELTA pre-course task and trying to make sure you had... Continue Reading →
The ever excellent Freakonomics podcast recently put out a podcast called "This Idea Must Die" in which they borrowed a concept from edge.org: every year Edge.org asks a question and asks its contributors (high level thinkers, scientists, academics and nobel laureates)... Continue Reading →
Is the language dying? A recent column in The Economist (Johnson: A long decline) asks the question from the perspective of a steadfast native British English speaker, looking around themselves and finding that the language they think they speak is,... Continue Reading →
Using video in the classroom is a great way to engage learners in the material, either from a topic perspective or with a particular language point. Young learners in particular seem to love the moving image and it can be... Continue Reading →
The idea of complexity theory and it's relationship to language and language learning is something that I've been starting to read into a bit more deeply recently. There's something about it that seems intuitively right, which usually means that I... Continue Reading →
Here's a nice infographic from the Kaplan blog about words with multiple meanings. I can think of three immediate ways to exploit this with a class: (1) Prediction - give students the keywords. Students then think of as many phrases... Continue Reading →
So we take a look around us and we see that everything in the world of TEFL is not good. We ask ourselves, how did we ever get into such a sorry state? Who is to blame? Who can we... Continue Reading →
