Jan 13, 2025 Exploiting Exercises, Grammar, Opinions, Teaching lexically, Uncategorized The desire paths of language users and learners 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 ‘path’. But as I did so, I started thinking that the this kind of path, which you see all over the place, could be a kind of […]
Nov 14, 2024 Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Exploiting Exercises, Pronunciation Dictation and decoding A long time ago I did a Diploma in TEFL and I remember a particular piece of feedback I was given after one of my observed lessons. In this lesson, I’d dictated a series of words to the students. Now, I can’t remember exactly what those words were or why I was dictating them, but […]
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 […]
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 […]
Mar 31, 2015 Exploiting Exercises, Resources Van Gogh’s ear and wordlists We’ve had a suggested adaptation of some material from a teacher, Amber Nowak, in the Netherlands. It’s a little bit different to what we initially envisaged here in that Amber has already exploited the material in the book, Go for It 3, by David Nunan by extracting and focusing on vocabulary in a text about […]
