I’m using more coursebooks in my current practice than I have done in a long time. This has put the importance of coursebook evaluation on my radar again. Coursebooks and EAL Adopting coursebook-driven ELT curricula in EAL contexts wouldn’t be… Read More ›
teacher development
Community building activities for tutor time
Last year, Joel Lawrence and I worked on some community building resources for tutor time at St. Joes. They were meant to be used as part of an induction phase, maybe weeks 1-2 of term. Nothing ground-breaking here! Just sharing… Read More ›
Interview task: create a lesson for a Year 10 IGCSE ESL class
I recently had an interview for a Head of EAL role here in Bangkok. It was for a school called King’s College, which is a fairly new school with a good reputation. I did okay – made it through to… Read More ›
AI experiments: IGCSE ESL speaking assessment bank
Yep, I’m still AI-novicing over here. Today I was looking for a quick fix for the upcoming IGCSE ESL speaking exams (window opens end of March). I wanted a curated bank of tests, or at least test-like questions for all… Read More ›
EAL adaptations: Lonely Planet Travel Writing
I teach a mainstream Year 7 class. The overall level is very high, but sometimes I think the in-house content we have could do with more scaffolding at times. I mean, it’s awesome content – I’m just talking a few… Read More ›
EAL adaptations: Floodland
I teach a support group of EAL learners in Year 6. We study the same content as all other English classes and take the same assessment. It’s just that the content and lesson resource needs a bit of adapting to… Read More ›
Interview task: Optimising the development of SLA in an international school
I had a positive job hunting experience towards the end of this week. I put out the feelers for work at a good school on Wednesday, was offered an interview on Thursday, interviewed Friday morning, then rejected Friday afternoon. Why… Read More ›
Research in brief: Disciplinary literacy and verbal language in PE
I haven’t come across many studies into disciplinary literacy development in PE, so this action research from Lindberg (2024) is fascinating. Here’s a very brief summary – logging it here for my own reference more than anything! The action research… Read More ›
Research in brief: Harnessing the translanguaging corriente
Article: The translanguaging pedagogies continuum (Ossa Parra and Proctor, 2022) Link here Summary: Research into best practice for teaching multilingual learners (in the US and elsewhere) has focused on English-only instructional settings, and systemic monolingual contexts. This runs contrary to… Read More ›
Research in Brief: Input Enhancement and L2 Grammatical Development
The research: Leow, R. P. (2008). Input enhancement and L2 grammatical development: What the research reveals. (Open access, see here) Type of research A meta-analysis of research into the effectiveness of different input enhancement techniques. The range of studies were… Read More ›