I had a brief chat with TalkTEFL after class about how some activities we make up during class work better than the things we plan! Today was a prime example. My teen class were really lacking a bit of get… Read More ›
General
My TEFL articles
I’ve just uploaded a few of my articles to Scribd. Hopefully I’ll have more to add in the future… Click here for advice on writing for ELT magazines. Here’s an article I wrote in July 2015 for ETp on error correction…. Read More ›
Reasons to explore your staffroom
What’s your staffroom like? Do you know what’s in all those cupboards and drawers? Is there dust collecting on most of the supplementary materials? What’s in that unlabelled ring binder? I’m lucky to have worked in some really well-stocked staffrooms…. Read More ›
What Kate and Kris did…
Happy New Year! Attention! New blog! My mates in Bangkok have started this site to help people who want to teach English. They offer general advice, opinion and interviews with current teachers, to give an idea of what the job is… Read More ›
Article for The Teacher magazine
I’ve had an article (this post) published in The Teacher magazine this month. As I mentioned in my post on ELT magazines, they always send you a free book of your choice when they publish your stuff! Was pleased to receive… Read More ›
Workstations for reviews (young learners)
I saw my boss use a simple workstation activity during a peer observation. It was a really good way to prepare students for their final task. I often include a quick 10-15 minute workstation activity in my YL classes now…. Read More ›
An EFL book I’ve used: Incredible English
Last year our course book for primary level learners was Incredible English. This was the first coursebook I ever used for teaching primary learners, and I have to say I thought it was great. It seemed like the perfect book… Read More ›
TEFL sniglets – ‘tiglets’
sniglet (noun): any word that should be in the dictionary, but isn’t. (Hall, 1983). I’ve been watching some old sniglet sketches from Not Necessarily the News recently. This one is by far my favourite (sorry for lack of quality): Call… Read More ›
Highlighting success criteria to young learners
This post explains simple coding you could use to help learners notice key features of a model text. I know this type of stuff is common in primary schools, so I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. It’s just not… Read More ›
A rant about comprehension questions
On my module in materials development we’ve just looked at reading and listening tasks. We spoke about what makes good/bad comprehension questions. ‘Plain sense’ questions are seen as pretty ineffective, as they just test familiarity with sentence structure rather than… Read More ›
ELT Planning 