Lesson planning Archives

More activities to revise language in class at low levels

Written by Andrew Walkley on April 30, 2025. Posted in Beginners & Low levels, Classroom Activities, Lesson planning, Revision, Teaching lexically. 4 Comments on More activities to revise language in class at low levels

Why do activities to revise language in class? Teachers sometimes see class time as only for ‘new’ input. Revision is for students to do at home. I understand that idea. It also depends a bit how long your class is. If you have one 50 or 60-minute class a week, maybe that makes some sense. And students do have to take some responsibility, right? Ultimately, languages are truly learnt and certainly become more ‘real’ when students study and use the language outside class. But then many students set aside 3 or 4 hours of their week to do a class, so expecting a huge amount extra is not...

Student-centred classes: it’s not just pair work!

Written by Andrew Walkley on April 4, 2025. Posted in Beginners & Low levels, Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Lesson planning. 1 Comment on 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 also comes from CELTA trainers urging to keep teacher talking time (TTT) to a minimum and others who frown on direct explicit teaching. However, I think this is a rather reductive way of thinking about learner-centred classrooms and hides important principles of...

Do we really need needs analysis?

Written by Andrew Walkley on March 14, 2025. Posted in Core Principles, Coursebooks, Grammar, Lesson planning. 9 Comments on 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 changes you can implement. What is more fundamental is ensuring that you give plenty of space for students to talk in genuine ways about themselves as an ongoing process where you can support them and make use of this information in a variety of smaller ways than changing the...