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 →
“We have had all kinds of rubbish thrown at us over the last 10 to 20 years,” he says. “We've been told that kids only learn properly in groups. We've had people claiming that children learn using brain gym, people... Continue Reading →
This is an activity I did with with an intermediate group of young learners - who absolutely loved it. It led to what was easily the longest conversations they'd had in English all year. It probably wouldn't take much... Continue Reading →
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