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 […]
Feb 15, 2015 Grammar, Opinions Further thoughts on teaching grammar Last week, I posted up a few thoughts I’d had on starting to teach (at IH London) a part-time, six-week evening course called Focus on Grammar. Following the second lesson with my lovely class last Thursday night, here are a few more things that have been going through my mind about grammar, the way we […]
Feb 11, 2015 Grammar, Opinions Some reflections on the universal panacea Last week I started teaching a six-week evening course at International House, London. For someone with such a keen interest in lexically-oriented teaching, the decision to go for the Focus on Grammar option may seem perverse, but I’ve long maintained that learning to look at language from a lexical point of view has made me […]
Jan 28, 2015 Classroom Activities, Opinions Still cutting up cards! Activities for storing and retrieving chunks We’re delighted to feature our very first guest post. At IATEFL Harrogate last year, one of the sessions we enjoyed was by a young teacher called Andrea Borsato, who was working at International House, London at the time. Andrea was partly focusing on a subject close to our hearts – the revising and recycling of […]
Nov 5, 2014 Opinions, Vocabulary Choice Why teachers shouldn’t prefer blonde I recently asked a couple of colleagues which word they thought was more frequent – arise or blonde. Almost immediately, the answer blonde came back. However, despite the confidence of the response, according to the British National Corpus (BNC) and various dictionaries, my colleagues were wrong! Arise is in fact nine times more frequent than […]
