
Author Archives
Teacher and Materials Writer
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Embedded formative assessment (New Directions)
I was lucky enough to deliver a video presentation alongside Alan Pulverness (TransformELT) at New Directions East Asia conference. We introduce the concept of formative assessment, explain typical formative assessment strategies, and discuss some challenges in embedding such strategies in… Read More ›
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Review: Memory – What Every Language Teacher Should Know
Memory – What Every Language Teacher Should Know is an independent published book by Steve Smith and Gianfranco Conti. Both writers are very experienced MFL teachers, curriculum designers, materials writers, bloggers, etc. Overview The aim of the book is ‘to… Read More ›
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A Comprehensive Language Coaching Handbook: Theory and Practice
This review originally appeared in IATEFL Voices 290. You’ll be pleased to know that Voices reviews have a 400 word limit, which saves you the pain of all my usual rambling in reviews! Haha. Gabriella Kovács. Pavilion Publishing, 2022 This… Read More ›
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Review: Academic Writing – Mastering Citation and Referencing
Academic Writing: Mastering Citation and Referencing is the latest publication from Prosperity Education. The book is aimed at learners on pre-sessional university courses, who are looking for a clear introduction to academic writing skills. The resource is suited to self-study,… Read More ›
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Useful resource: Comics Uniting Nations
Comics Uniting Nations aims to make the UN Sustainable Development Goals more accessible through comics. You can learn more about the partnership and its collaborators on their website. It looks like the project is inactive these days, but the site… Read More ›
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Special Offer! IH Introduction to Teaching CLIL course
My buddy from the Yangsan days, Katja Preston, now coordinates the courses for IH Online Teacher Training Institute. She’s kindly offering readers of this blog a discount for the upcoming CLIL course (authored by Amanda McLoughlin), woohoo! Here’s the info!… Read More ›
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Materials writing news and views, January 2023
It’s been a while! Thought I’d get the news and views back up and running. Where to start? Well, it can’t be with research. I haven’t read any research into materials development in the last few months. Just been super… Read More ›
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Using the Global Gender Gap Report in EAL
I’ve been writing a module on gender equality recently. As part of the research, I’ve read (chunks of) the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2022: You can view/download the report here. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t come across… Read More ›
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EAL support for mainstream English
What does ‘EAL support’ look like in (or alongside) mainstream English lessons. Here’s an example of some support I provide to help with literature. It was with a Year 7 class (all learners on the EAL register). They were studying… Read More ›
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Retrieval starters in EAL
Just a quick one! Nothing groundbreaking here, ha! We used ‘Smart Starts’ at my last school. They called it a ‘Do It Now!’ which I thought was intense… Anyway, it was basically a retrieval task which the learners could get… Read More ›