May 7, 2025 Beginners & Low levels, Chunks, Exploiting Exercises, Lexis, Revision, Teaching lexically Rereading texts to revise language at low levels Rereading texts to revise language can be good because we access language outside the selection in exercises labelled vocabulary or grammar. Whether you have treated the listening or reading text as purely developing skills or not, there is good reason to revisit texts to focus on language – especially when we want to revise content […]
Apr 30, 2025 Beginners & Low levels, Classroom Activities, Lesson planning, Revision, Teaching lexically 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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Jan 6, 2025 Chunk of the day, Chunks, Lexis Boat Idioms There are a lot of boat idioms in English perhaps as a result of the history and geography of UK itself. The United Kingdom has almost 8000 miles of coastline and a long history as a seafaring nation, so it’s no surprise that many words and phrases that were originally used on boats and at […]
