I think it hit home about five minutes before the lesson: ‘Am I really going to base a 30 minute activity around this bottle of murky water? Surely this can’t work…’ Most of the activities I’ve tried from ‘Teaching Grammar… Read More ›
reflections
What I learnt from my first TESOL conference
Finally, some time to reflect on CamTESOL, which was held on 18-19 February. It was my first ever teaching conference (both attending and presenting), so thought I’d jot down a few reflections. Presenting is tough but rewarding… Teaching and presenting… Read More ›
Making it up as you go along…
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
The role of research in TEFL
I’ve been thinking about the role of research in TEFL recently. This was prompted by Dr Paula Rebolledo’s closing plenary on Day 2 of the Teaching for Success online conference, titled ‘How could research inform EFL practice?’ You can watch… Read More ›
Recent whiteboard work
I mentioned a few whiteboard tips this time last year. I should probably follow my own advice, because my recent whiteboard work has been a bit shoddy. I’ve been taking some pictures of my recent boards. I won’t post them… Read More ›
ClassDojo – not a no go
Sometimes I think I’m far too serious to teach young learners. Maybe my expectations are too high. Maybe I just don’t ‘get’ them. Perhaps I’m getting too old. Maybe I’m just not learning how to teach them properly. I don’t… Read More ›
ELT Planning 