Apr 25, 2025 Beginners & Low levels, Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Lexis, Teaching lexically, Vocabulary Choice Low level activities to revise vocabulary: what to choose To learn words students need to recall and use them multiple times, so it is good to have activities to revise vocabulary in class. In this post I look at choosing items to revise and what difference low levels makes on this and the tasks we do.Not just vocabularyThe first thing to say is that […]
Apr 4, 2025 Beginners & Low levels, Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Lesson planning Student-centred classes: it’s not just pair work! What do teachers mean by student-centred classes? It seems some only see it as increasing pair work and reducing whole class teaching. The teacher should be a facilitator setting up tasks and watching, rather than doing explicit teaching. That at least was an impression I had from one teacher at a recent training, but it […]
Mar 25, 2025 Chunks, Developing materials, Lexis, Vocabulary Choice Collocations: using collocation dictionaries and AI When choosing collocations to teach, I often used references like Oxford Collocations . Now AI offers help, but is it any better? And are collocations actually what we should search for?In recent times I have done less of this kind of searching for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I tend to do this more when […]
Mar 14, 2025 Core Principles, Coursebooks, Grammar, Lesson planning Do we really need needs analysis? Teachers are often urged to conduct a needs analysis at the start of their course. But if your analysis is just choosing a coursebook, don’t feel guilty. The reality of most teachers’ contexts and the students they have is that a formal needs analysis often won’t produce anything you don’t know already or lead to […]
Feb 26, 2025 Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Developing materials, Opinions, Teaching lexically Planning lessons: chat is an outcome too. When we talk about planning lessons that have an outcome, teachers often misinterpret this as meaning all lessons should have a clear practical benefit. They may feel that following an action-oriented approach (as follow the CEFR calls it), means we should only design or select tasks where students role-play practical activities, resolve problems, or reach […]
