Here are some more scaffolding tweaks I’ve made to our Year 7 mainstream English content. Last term, learners studied ‘Fantasy Writing’. It was an awesome topic and the in-house resources overall were brilliant. I had tons of fun teaching it!… Read More ›
Lesson Ideas
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 ›
EAL lessons: Robbie (Isaac Asimov)
Here’s an example of the EAL content I’m putting together these days. Last year, I was teaching a group of A1-A2 level multilinguals (Year 8, aged 13) in a support group. We were looking to introduce them to authentic literature…. Read More ›
EAL response to literature displays
I recently mentioned how our learners created a final display board in response to a unit on poetry. Here’s a screenshot of what our common assessment checklist looked like for the final product: I could scrutinize here – there’s room… Read More ›
EAL INSET: Reviewing vocabulary
I put together three different EAL INSETs this year. Two were delivered to the whole high school, and one was an in-department session. Here’s a summary of the first session. Session 1: Reviewing academic vocabulary Why this session? I usually… Read More ›
Low-prep EAL: what’s the answer?
End of term. Rocking the classic ELT games with genuine purpose. Lesson time: 40 mins. Context: Year 10. Three learners. Biology. We’ve been reviewing such topics as… cell structure, specialized cells, the circulatory system, the components of blood. Game prep:… Read More ›