It’s been mandatory to teach Thai culture and language at international schools here in Thailand since the late 1990s. The Thai Ministry of Education recently produced new guidance for international schools on how they should teach Thai history, culture, and… Read More ›
I’ve been working with AI to create an academic English syllabus for EAL learners. The last post shared the full syllabus map (see here). I’m moving on to document an important step here – outlining the instructional design principles. Why… Read More ›
Many international schools in Thailand are choosing to shape their tiered EAL support around a coursebook. That’s one way to do things, and I can’t say whether it meets the needs of learners in every context. Personally, I think there… Read More ›
I’ve just been through a worthwhile interview process with a school network called ISP (International Schools Partnership). I didn’t get the job, but I enjoyed the experience and learnt a lot about the company (and myself) through it. ISP network… Read More ›
This week I attended a live CPD webinar at my school on oracy development, led by Jeffrey Boakye. He’s an ex-teacher, oracy specialist, and author on race and identity. Find out more about him here. There’s been a real push… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
We request feedback on our EAL provision from learners twice a year – towards the end of Term 1 and Term 3. We are open to further feedback at any point, but that’s just when we request it. How do… Read More ›
In my previous post about the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), I mentioned how certain EAL assessment descriptors are more aligned with the CEFR than we might think.. What I should have said is that the Bell… Read More ›
Where to start? January obvs… ‘The big one’ At the start of the year I was deep into a project with Pearson International, writing the 2nd Edition of their IGCSE English as a Second Language coursebook. I’ve written about the… Read More ›
