One Postcard

In my one to one class the other day, my student pulled this postcard out of her bag. No to Contemporary Art # P4, 2006 by Patrick Guns (www.patrickguns.com). Printed by www.kletandko.be. I immediately seized upon the image as I thought it was an arresting image and just the kind of thing I like to use with my students. It’s an ambiguous image, probably photoshopped, with a small amount of interesting language and with plenty of scope for investigation. Below I’ve listed 41 different things you could say to your student(s) in response to this image. 1) What do you like and dislike about...

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ELTchat Blog Challenge: My First Lesson Plan

The current ELTchat Blog Challenge is to share with us your first lesson plan. If you can't find it or threw it away in a tidy up many moons ago, then why not tell us about your first ever lesson as an EFL teacher? What do you remember? What do you wish you'd known then that you know now? And when you look back on that lesson, how do you trace your own development since that day? I'd love to hear about your memories and reflections. If you'd like to learn more, listen to Bethany Cagnol's reflections on the ELTchat podcast. I've actually already blogged about my first ever lesson, in fact it...

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IATEFL issues: People

Just a small part of the marvellous PLN at IATEFL this year. For me, there's no doubt what the highlight of any conference is. Yes, the presentations are great, and yes, it's an opportunity to visit a great city, and yes, the parties are fun, but first and foremost, it's about the people. And luckily for me, I'm part of a wonderful professional learning network of like-minded, equally passionate educators who I not only have the honour of knowing online, but occasionally get the privilege of meeting face to face. And while we do have fun together (and we do have fun!), we also talk a lot...

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IATEFL Issues: Dogme (or Wandering Naked Through the Dogme Forest...)

So Dogme ELT was one of the big issues of the conference. Big surprise, I hear you say. Well I'm sorry if you're tired hearing about it, but it's not going away. If this conference proved anything, it showed firstly that there are still a lot of teachers who don't know what Dogme ELT is, and secondly that even some of the ones who have heard of it don't really know what it is, even though they think they do. More about that later... Ever since I have become interested in Dogme, I have heard the same old arguments against unplugged teaching and I'm becoming a little bored of them, to be honest....

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IATEFL Issues: Work

The first of my reflections on the IATEFL conference... One thing is for sure: teaching is hard work. It is time consuming and should probably pay more. But for me one of the questions that came out of the IATEFL conference this year was do we do enough of the right kind of it and furthermore, do our students? The matter of student work was plainly laid out by Jim Scrivener in his talk "Demand High Teaching" (read more here). He posited that we have become too touchy-feely and too nice to our students. In his observations, based on watching classes all around the world and his discussions...

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