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…
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…
Something better change: taking a stand against gender bias in ELT
Earlier this year I spoke at the very first International Language Symposium in Brno, the second-biggest city in the Czech Republic. Prior to the conference itself, I'd agreed with the organisers that I'd be doing a plenary and a workshop,…
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…
Grammar nonsense 4: relative clauses
This is less a post about the craziness of description and more one about the way grammar is presented and the expectation that grammar should always be practised – and practised in particular ways. Grammar McNuggets and overprotectiveness Scott Thornbury has…