Learner Diaries: Reading Woe & Writing Joy Part 2

I wrote here about how I battled with a story given to me by my Portuguese teacher. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you read that first, or this post won’t make much sense. Feedback, or Should I Say Correction? So having expressed my displeasure at the difficulty of the story to my teacher, I was interested to see how he would react. I wasn’t too concerned about his response as while he may have flaws as a teacher, but he doesn’t seem to have too many as a human being, so I felt that he would deal with it in a positive way. Fortunately, I was correct in my assumption. His first reaction...

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Minimal Materials Blog Challenge: Vocabulary Revision with Post It Notes

Richard Gresswell (@inglishteacher) has been running a minimal resources blog challenge over on his ELTbites blog. Here are his rules: “Describe an activity that requires no more than the teacher, students, and possibly making use of the  board, pens, and paper. Describe the activity aims and procedure concisely in no more than 200 words.” So here’s my entry, a simple vocabulary revision activity I did last week with a class of two business students... In the previous lesson, one of the language needs that emerged was how to express an opinion. In the next class I wanted to...

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Learner Diaries: Reading Woe & Writing Joy

I wrote here about the importance of finding the right level of difficulty in a reading text for your students, and after trying and failing with my current Portuguese reading homework, I'm returning to the theme. The Wall I realised that this text was was going to be a struggle too far when, in just the third sentence I found nine words that I didn't know. That's right, nine out of twenty.  If that's not a barrier to student engagement I don't know what is. In fact, it's not just a barrier, but a mile high wall that I had no intention of climbing. Firstly, I reacted to this sentence...

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Teaching Business People to Tie Their Shoes

Here’s a video I’ve been using with my business students. It uses a very short TED talk by Terry Moore, all about tying shoes: What I love about his video is how he takes something so commonplace and mundane and makes his incredibly intelligent audience realise that they are doing it wrong. He does this with great wit and flourish, before ending with the moral of his story which is the real message behind his talk. That sometimes a small advantage someplace in life can yield tremendous results someplace else. It’s a simple message, but can create a very fertile...

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Great city, great conference: TESOL France 2011

Last weekend was the 30th Annual Tesol France Colloquium in Paris, and as that is just a short hop over the border for me, I had to be there. And with so many of my PLN in attendance, I really didn’t have a choice! There are so many things you get out of attending a conference like this that it’s hard to summarise. Here are some of my observations... Luke Meddings takes us on a dogme tour of Paris Luke Medding’s fascinating plenary compared the city planning of Paris with the planning of a lesson. I loved his analogy of how we explore cities and language. And in case you are wondering...

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