In this guest post, Patrick Gallagher outlines how he uses the WORD / CHUNK OF THE DAY sections of this website with his students. We hope it'll give you some ideas for how you could explore and exploit these texts…
Back to school Part Five: challenges and homework
As if to prove the point about procrastination and failing to do stuff outside class that I made in my last post reflecting on my own language learning experiences, I'm almost ashamed to begin by admitting it has been over…
Twenty things in twenty years part ten: the main point of focusing on pronunciation in class isn’t to improve pronunciation!
Pronunciation is quite possibly the most neglected area of language teaching. In many of the classes I’ve observed over the years, I’ve seen little or no attempt to work on pronunciation and where it IS focused on, it’s often instinctive…
Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Nine: the vast majority of mistakes really aren’t to do with grammar!
The world used to be so tidy. Back in the misty morning of my youth, I seriously did naively believe that the root cause of student error was essentially grammatical. If only students could somehow have the ‘rules’ for the…
Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Seven: Input is more important than output
To say that the CTEFLA that was my gateway into the world of English Language Teaching encouraged me to be output-focused would be an understatement. Like many teachers who’ve come through the British ELT system, with its roots firmly in…
Back to School Part Four: homework … or the lack of it.
In recent years, we've seen much made of the idea of the ‘flipped’ classroom. In ELT terms, this often involves urging students to study words and grammar outside of the classroom - presumably by using a dictionary and doing exercises…
Why ‘Is it formal or informal?’ is perhaps my most-hated question in ELT
Let's face it, over the years, we've probably all asked plenty of questions in class that we later look back on and regret. This starts from our very first teaching practice when we become aware of the fact that we've…
Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Five: there really is no need for needs analysis!
One of the more ridiculous notions instilled in me on my month-long CELTA course taken back in the early 1990s was the idea that via a scribbled sheet of paper containing a few topics and some grammar structures, I might…
Back to School Part Three: lessons of forgetting and laughter
They say that learning a foreign language is a good way of avoiding dementia in later life, but with learning Russian I sometimes feel that maybe dementia has already set in! Words taught mere seconds ago can become a blank…
Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Two: Troubling trouble when trouble troubles you!
There are plenty of things that you generally don’t learn on a four-week CELTA course: how bizarre many of the staff rooms you’ll later find yourself in will be; how rife the illegal photocopying of published material is around the…