Oct 6, 2017 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Lexis, Opinions, The state of our profession On the over-use of concept-checking questions: part 1 There aren’t many things that I think should be comprehensively banned from EFL classrooms, but the use of closed CCQs (Concept-Checking Questions) for items of vocabulary is one! For those of you unfamiliar with CCQs, they seem to have come into the ELT mainstream via International House and the very early teacher training courses offered […]
May 19, 2017 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions, The state of our profession Complicating the coursebook debate part 3: coursebook use Today’s post follows on from another recent post that looked at some of the so-called false assumptions that supposedly lie at the heart of coursebooks. The assumptions, as stated in a recent piece by Geoff Jordan, are that all coursebooks and coursebook-using teachers “lead students through each unit and do the succession of activities in […]
Apr 27, 2017 Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions Complicating the coursebook debate part 2: can’t we just be friends? This week I thought I would take a break from the grammar series (to be continued!) and pick up on the discussion of coursebooks that Hugh started some time ago with the somewhat optimistically titled Complicating the coursebook debate part 1. This was almost two years ago now and we never even managed to move […]
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 discourse […]
Jan 14, 2015 Beginners & Low levels, Chunks, Coursebooks, Teaching lexically Useful chunks to teach beginners: What’re you doing later? Lots of useful chunks that we could teach beginners, don’t get taught early on because they’re seen as examples of ‘advanced’ grammar. For instance, the common question What are you doing later? will be absent from most beginner courses and rarely feature even at Elementary or Pre-Intermediate because it’s ‘the present continuous with future reference’. […]
