How I Would Test

"Good morning everyone and welcome to your English test. Please take a seat.  Remember, cheating is absolutely forbidden. However, discussion with your peers, using Google on your smartphone and leaving early if you finish is absolutely fine and encouraged.Let's begin. Here are your exam papers. Now, in silence, you must flick through the pages and have a look at all the questions before we start. Make sure you read them all carefully. You have 5 minutes to complete this.Okay, time up everyone. Now get together in groups of three or four and discuss how you feel about the test....

Read more ►

BELTA Webinar - An Invitation

I am very pleased to announce that on Sunday the 25th of November at 1700 CET, I will be participating in a live webinar to launch the Belgian English Language Teachers Association (BELTA). This is a project that a number of us teachers here in Belgium have been working on for some months and we are delighted to be in a postion to launch the association on Sunday. I'll be joined by Mieke Kenis (@mkofab) and Guido van Landeghem (@europeaantje) and we'll explain why we've decided to set the association up, what we hope to achieve, and how you can help us. We hope you can make it. Update You...

Read more ►

Tesol Greece Blog Challenge: Can Technology Save The Day When Times Are Tough?

To inaugurate their new blog, TESOL Greece have invited bloggers to answer the following question: ''During an economic crisis, resources (books, budgets, infrastructure) are limited but high standards and qualifications are required so that learners can survive on the job market. Can the use of technology help learners and teachers overcome this problem? If so, how?'' The question suggests that when times are tough economically, it becomes harder for teachers to access the kinds of resources that are normally available, and this is undeniably true. However, it also suggest that this leaves...

Read more ►

Blog Challenge: Tell Me About Your City

Love your town? Think more people should know about it? Want to be published on one of the world’s leading travel blogs? Then read on! Barcelona by the author I’m one of those people who loves to travel, and due to the wonderful world of the Internet, I am part of a wonderful network of teachers that is spread literally all over the world. We are blessed to have friends both near and afar, and discover new cultures, whether in person or online. As cliched as it is, both experiences really do broaden your horizons.Unfortunately, much as I’d love to, I can’t come and visit you all and see...

Read more ►

Guest Post: Being Yourself

I'm delighted to welcome back Ania Musielak to the blog. Ania is a passionate teacher and teacher trainer from Poland who I have been lucky to see speak at international conferences. She is well known for her energetic and dynamic presentations, often speaking about her passions of drama and literature. Here she argues that in our teaching we shouldn't chase the latest trends and that our lessons must reflect our personalities and strengths. When I was 19 I started my driving course. All my friends already had driving licenses, some even had their own cars and they said that...

Read more ►

Shut Up!

Let's face it, one of the hardest things for us teachers to do sometimes is to shut up. We can feel the need to keep teaching all the time and somewhere deep in our subconscious  we have been led to believe that teaching means talking. Maybe we don't realise what we are doing, or we find it hard to resist. We might be waiting for the training that makes us realise it's okay to be quiet for a while, or we might have a great story we want to share and half way through we realise we're really going on a bit too much here.  Either way, it's surprisingly hard and many...

Read more ►

Time to Think!

So summer is over. The leaves are turning brown and the nights are coming in. This can only mean one thing: it's time to start blogging again. After two months off, it's time to go back to the keyboard, dust off some of those Google docs that have been sitting in the ideas folder and get writing. And I can't wait, I've got so many things I want to share with you. Firstly, I hope you like the new design of this blog. I decided it was time for a spring clean, so I've spruced it up with a new template and easier navigation. I'm not completely finished yet and there are still a few things I'd...

Read more ►

A Tale Of Two Teachers

Meet Steve... True story... Here’s a tale of two teachers, Steve and Bob. They both teach the same class, one after the other. After almost every lesson, Steve returns to the teachers room, sits down at his desk, lets out an audible sigh and then proceeds to moan about the students. They don’t engage, he complains, they don’t get what he’s trying to do. The atmosphere around him is negative and other teachers look at each other with a look that says “here he goes again...”. Steve then opens up his big folder of lesson plans, photocopies the materials he needs for tomorrow’s lesson and goes...

Read more ►

Matching Pairs

Matching activities are as old as the hills. Sometimes it seems that some coursebook writers just can't resist asking students to link a word to its definition, or to reunite two halves of a sentence, such as this example from a recently published coursebook. As an activity, it doesn't exactly thrill me. It's very functional and helps the student to connect ideas, but it's also very rigid and doesn't give the student an opportunity to work on creating their own, more personally relevant sentences. The problem isn't so much with the actual task, but with the idea undergirding it. Personally...

Read more ►

52: Bailout

52 by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings is an e-book collection of subversive activities for the ELT classroom (see also the support blog Subversive Teaching 52). Each of the activities in the book attempt to engage the learner and the teacher in a challenging conversation. They are both forced to question, investigate and debate the world that we live in. Since I like to push my students to engage critically with materials, I’m always on the lookout for interesting and demanding stimuli for my lessons. Subsequently this book was just what I was looking for. As they say themselves...

Read more ►