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Twenty things in twenty years part ten: the main point of focusing on pronunciation in class isn’t to improve pronunciation!

1st March, 2021

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…

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Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Eight: There’s nothing as practical as a good theory

7th November, 2020

In the early years of my career, like many others in my profession, I suffered from an insatiable hunger for recipes. I devoured the resource books that were available in the staff rooms of the schools I was teaching in,…

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Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Seven: Input is more important than output

26th September, 2020

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…

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Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Five: there really is no need for needs analysis!

3rd May, 2020

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…

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Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Four: the way I was taught to teach grammar crippled my understanding of grammar!

24th April, 2020

I feel it best to warn you in advance that this is a post that could potentially spiral wildly out of control! It may also, I fear, contain themes I’ve entered into from slightly angles during other posts in this…

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Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Three: kicking the grammar habit

22nd April, 2020

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my induction into English Language Teaching via a four-week CELTA at Westminster College (and, indeed, my subsequent year-long part-time DELTA) left me with that very same affliction that so many of our students still…

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Twenty Things in Twenty Years Part Two: Troubling trouble when trouble troubles you!

21st April, 2020

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…

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Twenty Things In Twenty Years Part One: Falling Into A Me-Shaped Hole

20th April, 2020

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…

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Chunk of the day

In one of my recent classes, we were discussing the way in…

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Opinions

Teaching through the tears: creating cross-border classes in a time of conflict

I first went to Russia in December 1999 to visit a friend of mine who’d just taken a teaching job there. Little did I know then what a central part in my life the country would come to play over…

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