Learner Diaries: Reading, Stories & Vocabulary.

This is a picture of my Portuguese homework, which I'm showing to you as a cautionary tale. If you give a text to your students and it has as much highlighted text in it as mine does, the chances are that they are not really reading the story. They are more likely to have their heads in the dictionary than they will be getting involved in the narrative, questioning the characters motivation or attempting to understand the author's point of view, all things that fiction is supposed to provoke. When reading becomes solely about vocabulary acquisition, so many opportunities for debate, discussion,...

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Blogoversary & Blog Challenge: What's Your Story?

Last weekend it was my first blogoversary. A big thank you to everyone who has stopped by, retweeted the links, added me to their blog roll and RSS feed, and commented. The following post is part of Vicky Loras’ blog challenge and it seemed to fit with my first proper post from just over a year ago. In the challenge she asked us to reflect on one of the options below: Have you made a big move? A career change? Have you been teaching and living in a country for a long time, but have seen changes in yourself as a person, educator or both? Are you thinking of a change in the future? I’ve...

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ELTchat Summary by Edith Occelli - How can you teach Business English with minimal experience of being in the business world?

The following ELTChat summary was written by Edith Occelli, but as she doesn't have a blog of her own, I offered mine so she'd get the opportunity to share it with everyone. I'm sure you'll agree that she's done a fantastic job. You can follow Edith on Twitter at @EdithOccelli. ELTchat - How can you teach Business English with minimal experience of being in the business world? Last Wednesday's ELTchat 9pm discussion focused on the interesting (albeit controversial) topic of Business English and whether it is possible to teach BE classes having no business...

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