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 ►

Guest post: BESIG Summer Symposium 2012 report

On 16 June 2012 the Besig Summer Symposium took place in Paris. Unfortunately I couldn't be there, so I asked Mieke Kenis and Vicky Loras, two people who were lucky enough to be present, to report back for me.  I was really looking forward to the symposium for various reasons. It would be my first ever Besig event, David Crystal was going to be the plenary speaker and the programme looked very promising. Furthermore I was taking a colleague of mine, whom I was going to introduce to some Twitter friends. The train journey from Brussels to Paris wasn’t long enough to tell him all about...

Read more ►