IATEFL2017: Wise Words
Lots of clever, experienced and skilled people gave talks at the IATEFL Glasgow this week. And many of them quoted other clever, experienced and skilled people. Here is my collection of … Continue reading
IATEFL2017: Growing Minds
I spent the past week at the IATEFL Glasgow 2017 conference – the ELT event of the year. The programme was absolutely overwhelming: picking talks and workshops out of the … Continue reading
Stretching the Mind: Introducing a New Grammar Structure
Memorisation and rote learning have been a bit of taboo in language learning for a long time. They were seen as behaviorist ideas which viewed as form and habit, whereas … Continue reading
Observing a Class: Life doesn’t come with instructions but…
Sometimes a 90-min lesson flies by. Sometimes it just drags on and on and you think it’s never going to finish. Not in the class I saw this week. I … Continue reading
I am in love!
He is not tall, dark and handsome. In fact, not even a he. Nor a she, for that matter. Nothing weird’s going on here, I can assure you. It is … Continue reading
The Year Gone By
Here is a little activity for those last or first lessons of the year. Haven’t tried it myself yet but I thought that if I blogged about the idea, I … Continue reading
A Picture Tells a Thousand Stories
I am a thief, no doubt about it. Sometimes new teaching ideas just appear out of nowhere but often you see or hear about something that someone else has done … Continue reading
Putting on our dancing shoes
I don’t own a pair of dancing shoes but in the last 7 days I have put them on twice, both literally and metaphorically. The Dancing English Teacher gracefully floated … Continue reading
Are Our Pasts Perfect? – Teaching the Past Perfect
Meet my sister, the star of one of my lessons this week. Why is it that the past perfect tense always seems such a tricky thing to teach? I don’t … Continue reading
Together we are stronger
Challenge no. 1. Working as a freelance adult educator can be a lonely business. Lots of travel involved and often you have no or very little contact with your colleagues. … Continue reading
Many heads are better than one – Lesson Warmers
I spent a couple of hours one afternoon this week with just over ten lovely language teachers. Did we drink coffee? Yes. Did we eat chocolate? Yes. Did we moan … Continue reading
Observing a Class – Learning by Developing
In a recent post I talked about the Learning by Developing approach developed by and used in a University of Applied Science. I was very interested in seeing how this … Continue reading
Learners Teaching Learners: Part 1
To begin with, it did make me feel like a lazy teacher. Like I was avoiding doing all the hard work. This was a one-semester course I taught about 18 … Continue reading
Cultural Differences and Teacher Awareness
Working in multi-cultural classrooms can be incredibly stimulating for both the learners and the teacher but it can also be a bit of a minefield. As a teacher, in addition … Continue reading
ELTBerry 