Jan 20, 2020 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Lexis, Opinions Beyond word lists: eight ways to get more from the OUTCOMES Vocabulary Builder One of the more innovative add-ons that accompanies the OUTCOMES series of General English coursebooks we wrote for National Geographic Learning is the Vocabulary Builder, which is often just known as the VB. The main idea behind the Vocabulary Builder was to provide both teachers and students with a list of language covered on each […]
Jan 5, 2020 Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions A different kind of Beginner-level book 5: Pronunciation Pronunciation: Really? Do I have to?While the bulk of Beginner coursebooks on the market are pretty uniform when it comes to the way they handle grammar and – to some extent – vocabulary, there seems to be little consistency when it comes to pronunciation and what to teach. Headway Beginner doesn’t have any pron sections […]
Nov 27, 2019 Opinions, The state of our profession Five things I’ve learned from running the ENGLISH QUESTIONS ANSWERED group One of the side-effects of being a coursebook writer and teacher with a relatively high social media profile is that I get a lot of mail. A depressingly large chunk of this is simply messages saying things like HI! or WHERE ARE YOU FROM? Then there are messages from both teachers and students who are […]
Jul 24, 2019 Opinions Teaching young learners lexically We’re very pleased to be able to offer you another in our series of occasional guest posts by teachers and writers we admire. This time, a young teacher from Moscow called Masha Andreivitch, who we first saw speak at a conference over there last year, outlines her thoughts on how to apply a lexical way […]
Jun 9, 2019 Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions A different kind of Beginner-level book 4: a spiralling syllabus A spiralling syllabus is NOT just about grammarHopefully, you’ll have read our previous post on a spiral syllabus. In this short post, I want to add that the spiral syllabus doesn’t only apply to grammar. The same principles also apply to vocabulary and ‘functions’ and indeed to whole exchanges. In the case of vocabulary, this […]
