When people think about ELT conferences, they tend to picture the plenaries, presentations, workshops, and exhibitions. After all, these are the things which we see advertised in the online flyers and listed in the pages of programmes. And in terms of professional development these aspects of conferencing-going are a key part. However, I’d argue that most is often gained from the informal conversation you have with the person sitting next to you before a talk begins, the sharing of ideas over a coffee afterwards, and the chance meeting with someone who has similar interests. It’s called networking and although conference…
The language of playing games
Like many teachers, I use games in the classroom. It might be something quite basic like a quiz game or a game to review to some vocabulary. Sometimes it’s a more involved game based around the idea of a board game. Board games are generative and adaptable to target a variety of language aims. Such games also have their own language in terms of vocabulary to refer to the pieces (dice, counters, board etc.) and phrases such as ‘You go next.’, ‘It’s your turn.”, “Move forward 1 space.” and so on. Recently I used a snakes and ladders board game with…
A checklist for writing ELT worksheets
Most teachers like making their own worksheets – for example, maybe a reading text with some questions or a worksheet with tasks that accompany a video. The fun part is coming up with creative tasks but it’s easy to spend more time on aspects such as adding headings, titles, rubrics and so on. To speed this aspect of materials writing up, I have a mental checklist of things that appear in every worksheet. If you make them an automatic part of your writing process, it frees up more time for the fun creative stuff. 1 Titles The main title on the worksheet lets the students know…
Learning English with Robinson Crusoe
I recently read A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo which aside from being a great read will also be of extra interest to language teachers because it captures the progress of a language learner in English. Reading it also reminded me of an article I wrote many years ago for English Teaching Professional (Issue 15) all the way back in 2000(!) It was about the portrayal of one-to-one teaching in the book Robinson Crusoe and what we could learn from it. Here’s the article reprinted below. Feel free to comment if you have other examples of ELT lessons described in literature. Lessons for…
