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 ›
international school
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 ›
‘We’re on a journey with Bell / WIDA’
I hear this a lot during my interviews for EAL teaching/leadership roles. It’s in response to my question about which EAL assessment tool(s) the school use and *the extent to which they are embedded*. I love the honest responses from… 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: Language ideologies and pedagogical tensions
An interesting (small scale) study on home language use in the EAL classroom from Neokleous and Natlandsmyr (2025) – Link here. Plenty of interesting findings within those themes: Theme 1 Theme 2 Relating this to my context The findings seemed… Read More ›
Further IGCSE ESL musings
A few months ago, I wrote a post on the value of the IGCSE ESL course. I’ve had a few other thoughts since, which I’ve shared on other platforms. I just wanted to file those thoughts somewhere under ‘random Pete… Read More ›
EAL video summaries for parents
Earlier this year, we trialed video reports for our EAL parents and learners. Here’s a summary of what/why/how, pros, cons, etc. What were the video reports? We provided parents with a 5-minute video summary of their child’s progress across all… Read More ›
EAL recruitment: sharing information with candidates
In this post, I will provide an example of the information we share with applicants for our EAL roles. I’ll start with the example, then I’ll outline: So, here it goes… This is a copy-paste of the information we shared… Read More ›
Some general tasks for a new EAL department
I’ve posted a bit about the process of setting up a new EAL department. I’ve mentioned target setting, establishing teaching and learning principles, quality assurance processes, long- and medium-term planning, blah blah. You can view the posts through my Teaching… Read More ›
EAL long-term and medium-term planning
I recently shared an example unit of work from our EAL syllabus. Here some further insight into the long-term and medium-term planning for our syllabus. We are only in the second year of setting up our provision. Year 1 was… Read More ›
ELT Planning 