May 17, 2015 Coursebooks, Opinions, The state of our profession Complicating the anti-coursebook debate: Part 1 As some of you may be aware, there’s been a fair bit of coursebook bashing going on in the blogosphere over recent weeks. Given this, I’ve decided to lay down a few thoughts about the whole debate over here instead. The first point to make is something I’ve long said with regard to the Dogme […]
May 12, 2015 Classroom Activities, Lexis, Opinions Making active and creative use of all the languages in your classroom. I was recently at the third annual BELTA Day conference in Brussels, organised by the excellent Belgian English Language Teachers’ Association. Whilst there, I saw a really fascinating presentation by a local teacher called Joris Van Den Bosch. Joris has spent the last four years working as a secondary school EAL teacher at the British […]
May 6, 2015 Opinions, Pronunciation, The state of our profession Politics, pronunciation and the pursuit of perfection Tomorrow is election day here in the United Kingdom, and it looks set to be one of the most unpredictable results in many, many years. Depressingly, one of the key features of the political landscape over the last few years has been the rise of UKIP, a party for whom an exit from the European […]
Apr 26, 2015 Classroom Activities, Lexis, Opinions Asking more: why some questions are better than others There’s an old saying that claims questions are never dangerous – only answers are. Well, a recent presentation I saw by Jim Scrivener gave me pause to reconsider this received wisdowm and to ask whether some questions might be if not exactly dangerous, than at the very least far less useful, productive and worth learning […]
Apr 21, 2015 Exploiting Exercises, Resources Questions about words In my talk at IATEFL this year, I explained some of the limitations of asking traditional concept questions, especially when looking at vocabulary. What follows is a list of alternative types of checking questions about vocabulary. You may see some of the same question frames I used in the talk. The questions that I give […]
