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…
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…
Twenty Things In Twenty Years Part One: Falling Into A Me-Shaped Hole
In much the same way as I once found it inconceivable that I’d ever suffer the indignity of reaching the terrifying age of 30, so it seems preposterous that I've now racked up well over twenty-five years in English Language…
Back to school: Part One
As you may have noticed, we recently wrote a Beginner’s book and I have written a series of posts exploring the ideas behind it. One thing that's driving this two-man campaign (you can decide for yourself if that means it’s…
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…
In Memoriam: Remembering Michael Lewis
Like many of you, my first encounter with Michael Lewis came via his seminal 1993 book The Lexical Approach: The state of ELT and a Way Forward. I did my DTEFLA in 1995 and it had already made it onto…
Translation: tackling the taboo
As a native speaker teacher working in a multi-lingual teaching context in the UK, I am perhaps an unlikely convert to the cause of translation in language teaching, and it's been a long and winding road that's brought me here.…
Putting our words to work: rethinking Teacher Talking Time
English Language Teaching loves a good acronym. There’s ELT to begin with and then, of course, there’s EFL - English as a Foreign Language - ESL, English as a Second Language and EIL - English as an International Language. There’s…
Putting your principles into practice: lexical teaching in the age of eclecticism
Eclectic or just confused? As teachers, we’re often told that we’re now living in a post-method world and that we should all aspire to be principled eclectics, picking and choosing activities and techniques to teach the language. On one level,…
Teaching deaf, hard of hearing and visually impaired students
As someone who spends a fair amount of time meeting and working with teachers in different contexts, I get asked all manner of questions and have become very aware of the limitations of my own knowledge. If anyone asks me…