Apr 26, 2016 Classroom Activities, Opinions, The state of our profession The best improvisation is prepared improvisation One of the great delights of the annual IATEFL conference is seeing young teachers find their own voices and deliver confident, well thought-out presentations. One of the talks I enjoyed most in Birmingham this year was by Sebastian Lesniewski, and he’s been kind enough to provide a brief overview of his main ideas. Over to […]
Apr 25, 2016 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: come in for criticism President Obama has come in for criticism from BREXIT campaigners after commenting on the upcoming referendum The government has come in for criticism for failing to spend enough on flood defences. The plan has come in for heavy criticism because of the huge costs of the project. When does a collocation become a chunk? The […]
Apr 18, 2016 Opinions, The state of our profession CELTA, the native-speaker bias and possible paths forward Last week at IATEFL, Silvana Richardson delivered a rousing, righteous plenary tracing the historical roots of – and critiquing – the institutionalised mechanisms and habits of mind that continue to privilege native=speaker teachers over non-natives. The talk can be viewed online and speaks for itself, so suffice it to say that it was a powerful […]
Jul 2, 2015 Chunks, Phrase of the day Phrase of the day: What time…? Now, some of you may have been thinking that ‘chunk of the day’ had turned into ‘chunk of the month’ – or even ‘chunk of the year’! I’m afraid we’ve been a bit busy and perhaps a bit depressed by how in the run up to the election has turned into the aftermath of the election. You […]
Jul 1, 2015 Exploiting Exercises, Resources When are questions and teacher talk too much? We recently had a query from a reader regarding the kind of language-generating concept questions we advocate. Basically, he had received some criticism after a lesson observation that the class was too teacher-centred, too input heavy and students didn’t have enough time for output (aka – practice or production). There is no doubt that asking concept checks […]
