Teresa Bestwick tagged me in a tweet about materials writing earlier. ELTA Rhine were looking for someone to drop into a training session for pre-service teachers and chat about writing Secondary resources.
Teresa was going to help, I really wanted to help, couldn’t make it timewise. Had kids to look after. But tried to find time to make a vid.
I got home and sat down at about 4.30pm to share these random tips. Made some slides (QUICKLY!), recorded, sent them off at 5.50pm. There’s nothing polished, nothing structured, it’s loose, scatty, trying to be organised but like… er… This is me just, I don’t know just being real ‘me’ maybe?
You’re kinda on the journey with me here on a ‘public speaking’ front so please be patient. There are things I’d have phrased differently, there are some things I don’t explain well (although this is meant as a kinda ‘pause and chat about it’ in my eyes tbh) and I’ve literally chucked examples together. But… it’s me. I’ll get better, but I can’t do that without giving things a go.
Besides, doing this felt like I was on the Krypton Factor or something.
I think there are a few things in here to help pre-service teachers think about planning/writing lessons for teens. Some things maybe not, but certainly one or two of the tips! Thanks for the tag Teresa 🙂
P.s. this was really cobbled together as you’ll see, hence no references. The resources were Sprint 2 (ELi), Beyond A2+ (Macmillan), Learn English Teens (British Council), stuff from this blog for really quick examples.
Cheers
Categories: General, reflections, Uncategorized
ELT Planning 
Helpful tips here, Pete, even though I don’t teach teens 🙂 Can you share what text analysers you use for level checking? I’ve had mixed success with some in the past.
Many thanks for this!
Gemma
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Hey! Cheers for commenting 🙂
I use, or have used, text inspector (free version 250 words). My go-to for a while.
https://textinspector.com
The text analyzer from Road to Grammar:
http://www.roadtogrammar.com/textanalysis/
Lextutor.ca, which I used during my MSc and was a bit more (too!) technical:
https://www.lextutor.ca/vp/
It’s not something I’ve used recently and now it looks pretty aaaaargh but useful for checking word frequency I think.
EDIA Papyrus – I used this more when it was in beta but was good.
https://papyrus.edia.nl
There’s one from Duolingo now but won’t work on my phone for some reason. Haven’t used it yet but an option maybe (?)
https://cefr.duolingo.com
Vocab kitchen, used a few times, basic but ok
https://www.vocabkitchen.com/profile
There are also some sites that make it easy to grade their texts, which I like! NewsELA being one, but it’s not a profiler as such so bit of a tangent there.
Might be worth asking Julie Moore the same question, I think this might be her area of expertise…
Cheers!
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