elt

Review: The Routledge Handbook of Teaching English to Young Learners

This review of The Routledge Handbook of Teaching English to Young Learners by S Garton & F Copland (Eds) first appeared in IATEFL Voices Issue 276.

This handbook provides an overview of teaching English to young learners across a wide variety of international contexts. The editors state that this 540-page volume outlines the key issues in young learner teaching and offers a ‘plausible research agenda moving forward’. It achieves this for the most part, although there will inevitably be gaps given the scope of the book. (more…)

Review: EAL Hub

I know, this doesn’t happen often on ELT Planning. But here’s a site I don’t recommend.

EAL Hub is… well, this:

It sounds great in principle. Humph.

(more…)

Materials writing news and views, August 2020

*Opens hands expressively* Hello everyone, and welcome to this month’s update.

*Does cup holding/triangle hand thingy in front near belly* My name’s Pete, and today …

Ahhh you’ll get what I’m going on about in a minute.

New releases

Sarah Hillyard mentioned some webinars to promote a new pre-primary resource called ‘Little Stars’ (Pearson).
There’s still a lot of promo for the English for 21^st Century Skills book doing the rounds (Mavridi and Xerri, Express Publishing).
A new MFL-related release… Gianfranco Conti/Dylan Viñales, Spanish Sentence Builders.
How to Write Grammar Presentations and Practice from ELT Teacher 2 Writer is another new(ish) one.
Twinkl ESL have just started 3MinuteELT training vids. The first one was by the legendary Jo Gakonga.

(more…)

15 ELT educators to follow on LinkedIn

If you’re fairly new to LinkedIn as a teacher/writer then here are a few suggestions for who to follow. Some of these people are on Twitter too, but I come across them more on LinkedIn as my feed isn’t as busy. Note: this is not a ‘Top 15…’ but it’s people I find insightful and I hope you will too!

I have not linked to any profiles without permission but these people should be easy enough to find through the search bar. If you are one of these people and you are happy for me to link to you just get in touch.

ELT professionals group
This is probably the biggest group on LinkedIn for ELT teachers. Is a good feed of useful posts set up (I think?) by David Deubelbeiss, who is also worth following.

Tasha Fletcher
Tasha has just started a new blog at handsonlearninginesl, sharing tips and lesson ideas for ESL teachers. She’s present on both Twitter and LinkedIn and is doing a good job promoting her resources so far.

Karl Millsom
Karl works for JLA TESOL in Indonesia. He prompts some good discussion with his #ThursdayThoughts and ‘controversial views’. He’s been sharing interviews with prominent ELTers on his YouTube channel. (more…)

Reflection: Steps towards materials-light teaching

Me, Matt and Tiago chatted about lots of topics at the first Bangkok ELT Books n’ Beer session last night. Great fun!
The topic of materials-light teaching and dealing with emergent needs came up. Tiago is on a Celta to Delta journey at the moment and mentioned how he would like to try out techniques like Dogme ELT, although there are those fears…

What if I’m not skilled enough to elicit content from learners or prompt interaction?
What if I miss those triggers from the learners that should guide the lesson?
What if the whole thing just falls on its head?

Not Tiago’s words, just what I think we were getting at. We talked about how Dogme ELT must require so much teacher skill and experience, and that got me thinking:

How did I develop the confidence to do things like…

deal with having only a loose idea of where things might lead?
go with the flow?
let the learners lead?
enter class without books or handouts?!

(more…)

MA, PGCEi or Diploma?

Question from a reader:

I’m after some advice. I can’t decide which professional development course to do. I have a CELTA plus five years’ teaching experience and I’ve been thinking for a while about doing a DELTA or Dip. Then again, I’ve heard that for university jobs like teaching pre-sessional courses it’s good to have an MA. But recently I’ve heard people mention the PGCEi as a future-proofing qualification and I’m like… aargh! Which course should I do?

My comments:

(more…)

Finding work as a writer

I haven’t shared any tips for new writers for a while, not since my post on how to find commissioning editors. So, here it goes.

There’s nothing wrong with building connections at big publishers like Pearson, Macmillan, CUP, OUP, NGL (Cengage, whatever). It’s good to aim high and you might well get lucky. However, there are loads of other companies/organisations you can write for in ELT. If you aren’t getting much luck with the bigger publishers then why not look elsewhere?

Here’s a list of possible avenues for you to explore. Note:

this is not a list of endorsements
this is not comprehensive, it’s just some ideas to get you started

If you’d like to add any more ideas for fellow newbie writers then please do so in the comments.

The Content Station

‘Your trusted educational publishing team…’. This lot are easy to find on LinkedIn and active enough. The couple of times they’ve contacted me has been for editing rather than writing so if that’s your bag then maybe drop them a line.

Yeehoo Corporation

They produce a magazine called Phoenix English. They are often looking for copy – mostly churning out graded texts. The mag looks okay so this could be a good portfolio builder.

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Free lessons on Onestopenglish

Onestopenglish is still free at the moment. This is a great opportunity to make the most of their awesome resources. There’s so much available on the site: lesson plans, articles related to methodology, resources created by the Onestopenglish community… they’ve also been teaming up with institutions like NILE recently to provide tips for teachers.

I’ve written a few resources for site over the past year which I hope you will find interesting and useful. Most of them are for the Everyday Life series. They’re print-and-go adult General English resources, complete with teacher notes and student worksheets. These are often task-led and typically suit 1 – 1.5 hour lessons.

Everyday Life Lesson Topics:

Describing your neighbourhood

Article /resource for the Online Education series:

Parents as Temporary Teachers

Lesson Share Winning Resource:

Instant Coffee, a Black Mirror inspired short story with resources (for approximately three hours of class time)

Feedback on any of these resources is most welcome! I hope they come in handy for your own lessons.

One million visitors!

This blog is about to reach a milestone. By, I guess, Friday it will have had 1 million visitors.

Thanks to my awesome PLN for all your support, comments, and interest! When Martin Sketchley persuaded me to start blogging a while ago I never imagined that…

people would read it!
trainee teachers would find it useful! So many awesome comments from CELTA/Dip trainees. It means a lot, cheers.
blogging would lead to professional writing! Trust me – publishers do read ELT blogs.
I would enjoy blogging!

A few random blog facts/stats… (more…)

Materials writing news and views, July 2020

Last update before a nice break, woohoo!

New releases

Another one for Paul Ashe (with Jeremy Bowell) – Prospects.

I’ve seen Paul’s name around a bit recently. IH are running a course in online tutoring, he’s listed as a tutor on it.

Peter Fullagar/Jenny Dooley have a new book out through Express Publishing. Exam prep.

Silly Shakespeare for Students (Murray, Alphabet Publishing) has been getting some rave reviews. Walton Burns shared this on LinkedIn:

You can read my review of the series here. (more…)