Dec 23, 2018 Classroom Activities, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions, Revision, Teaching lexically, The state of our profession Translation in language classes: tackling the taboo Translation is a fantastic tool for all language teachers to use in their classes. That might be a surprising statement from a native speaker teacher working in a multi-lingual teaching context in the UK. and to be honest it’s been a long and winding road that brought me to that view. Let me take you […]
Oct 13, 2017 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Lexis, Opinions On the over-use of concept-checking questions: part 2 I recently wrote a post outlining why I’m not a fan of using concept-checking questions – CCQs – when dealing with vocabulary and if you’ve not read it, it may make sense to go there first before continuing. I ran through several reasons I find the continuing use of CCQs problematic when applied to vocabulary, […]
Oct 6, 2017 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Lexis, Opinions, The state of our profession On the over-use of concept-checking questions: part 1 There aren’t many things that I think should be comprehensively banned from EFL classrooms, but the use of closed CCQs (Concept-Checking Questions) for items of vocabulary is one! For those of you unfamiliar with CCQs, they seem to have come into the ELT mainstream via International House and the very early teacher training courses offered […]
May 19, 2017 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions, The state of our profession Complicating the coursebook debate part 3: coursebook use Today’s post follows on from another recent post that looked at some of the so-called false assumptions that supposedly lie at the heart of coursebooks. The assumptions, as stated in a recent piece by Geoff Jordan, are that all coursebooks and coursebook-using teachers “lead students through each unit and do the succession of activities in […]
Apr 27, 2017 Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions Complicating the coursebook debate part 2: can’t we just be friends? This week I thought I would take a break from the grammar series (to be continued!) and pick up on the discussion of coursebooks that Hugh started some time ago with the somewhat optimistically titled Complicating the coursebook debate part 1. This was almost two years ago now and we never even managed to move […]
