Mar 13, 2015 Grammar, Opinions Thoughts on teaching grammar: part four I finished teaching the Focus On Grammar course I’d been doing one evening a week at IH London last night. Like most teachers, I always hate that moment of goodbye at the end of a course, as you know you may well never again see the lovely people you’ve developed a relationship with. Despite that, […]
Mar 9, 2015 Opinions, Vocabulary Choice If you ask me … the problem with opening gambits Many moons ago, I enjoyed a brief and intense love affair with a book by Eric Keller and Sylvia Warner called Conversation Gambits. First published by LTP back in 1988, I came to it in the mid-1990s and at the time it was something of a revelation, containing as it did a whole host of […]
Mar 3, 2015 Lexis, Opinions Phrasal verbs: myths and realities Last year I was lucky enough to attend the PASE conference in Warsaw, where I saw a locally based teacher, Jonathan Marks, give a thought-provoking talk on phrasal verbs. Having long believed that this is one area of the language that’s incredibly badly presented in most coursebooks, and that subsequently is often poorly handled in […]
Feb 27, 2015 Grammar, Opinions Yet more thoughts on teaching grammar I’m now four weeks into the Focus on Grammar course I’m teaching at International House, London, which means only two more weeks to go. It’s been a strange and mostly fairly lovely experience, made much easier by having some really great students. It’s also been a course that has provoked two posts already – here […]
Feb 23, 2015 Opinions, Vocabulary Choice ELT: In need of family therapy? In my previous blogging incarnation on the CELT training site, I wrote about why lexical sets may be popular and about some of the downsides to them. That blog was closed when I left University of Westminster and I have since had a couple of requests to repost things. The first post – Why English […]
