Category Archives: thoughts on teaching

Emergent phonology

I’m teaching a group of C1 students at the moment. They’re university lecturers and the main aim of the course is to boost their confidence in their ability to teach through the medium of English.  Our brief for this term … Continue reading

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Attention breeds attention

This is a very short observation of a very small phenomenon, nothing new or ground-breaking, but something I wanted to explore.  I’ve noticed it a couple of times recently in my current class of mixed teens and adults. The first … Continue reading

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Reflecting on reflecting

[This post was also published on the British Council Teaching English blog. ] I’m two weeks into a new course with a new class and one of the questions on the BC blog this month got me thinking about how … Continue reading

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Is this flippin’ worth it?

shared by carterse on flickr under a creative commons licence In this post I want to look back at a series of activities I used with my beginners class last year with a couple of questions in mind.  First some … Continue reading

Posted in #eltchat, lesson ideas, reflecting on teaching, thoughts on teaching | Tagged | 9 Comments

looking back, looking forward

Yesterday was the last class of term with my beginners class.   The night before I sat at my computer and went through our lesson summaries from the last three months. I wanted to take stock of what we’d done.  As … Continue reading

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100 words

Following on from the class I wrote about in the last post , I received this piece of homework from one of the students.  I’ve added the photo as it’s one of my favourite beaches too – cows and all! TEXT: MY  … Continue reading

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What’s my role?

[part of an on-going series about teaching an A1.1 class using a negotiated-syllabus approach] As soon as we’d finished our class yesterday, I sat down at the computer to write a summary – not for the class, but for myself.  … Continue reading

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following a thread

A storm has blown up once again in the blogosphere over grammar McNuggets and it got me thinking about how I serve them up with my present class of beginners. So I decided to pick out one particular nugget and … Continue reading

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getting the balance right

This is part four in the series about my beginners class. In this and the next post I want to take a step back and look at the slightly bigger picture.  We’ve now been having classes for  a month and … Continue reading

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every board tells a story?

This is the third post in a short series about teaching beginners. You can see the first and second posts here and here. This was our board at the end of the second lesson. ( Click on the photo to … Continue reading

Posted in reflecting on teaching, thoughts on learning, thoughts on teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments