Mar 25, 2025 Chunks, Developing materials, Lexis, Vocabulary Choice Collocations: using collocation dictionaries and AI When choosing collocations to teach, I often used references like Oxford Collocations . Now AI offers help, but is it any better? And are collocations actually what we should search for?In recent times I have done less of this kind of searching for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I tend to do this more when […]
Mar 14, 2025 Core Principles, Coursebooks, Grammar, Lesson planning Do we really need needs analysis? Teachers are often urged to conduct a needs analysis at the start of their course. But if your analysis is just choosing a coursebook, don’t feel guilty. The reality of most teachers’ contexts and the students they have is that a formal needs analysis often won’t produce anything you don’t know already or lead to […]
Feb 26, 2025 Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Developing materials, Opinions, Teaching lexically Planning lessons: chat is an outcome too. When we talk about planning lessons that have an outcome, teachers often misinterpret this as meaning all lessons should have a clear practical benefit. They may feel that following an action-oriented approach (as follow the CEFR calls it), means we should only design or select tasks where students role-play practical activities, resolve problems, or reach […]
Feb 14, 2025 Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Teaching lexically, Uncategorized How should I use my coursebook? With principles! It seems that most teachers see the value of using a coursebook, but the bigger question is: how should I use them? That was my conclusion from reading a recent post on LinkedIn by Katherine Bilsborough. She asked for English language teachers who were anti-coursebook to explain why they were against using them. As it […]
Jan 13, 2025 Exploiting Exercises, Grammar, Opinions, Teaching lexically, Uncategorized Meet learners’ needs by following language desire paths If we want to meet learners’ needs, then try following their conversations and teach the language they desire rather than just what we set out to teach. I was out walking the other day and it being somewhat damp and muddy, I decided to stick to the paved pathway rather than take this more direct […]
