Apr 20, 2020 Opinions, The state of our profession, Twenty things in twenty years 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 Teaching! In acknowledgement and commemoration of this, I’ve decided that I shall attempt to blog […]
Feb 11, 2020 Grammar, Opinions, The state of our profession 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 an advertising campaign or a war!) is the commonly-expressed view that lexical approaches are only […]
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 […]
Mar 31, 2019 Opinions, The state of our profession 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 the reading list – possibly for the first time. It was utterly unlike any other […]
Dec 23, 2018 Classroom Activities, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions, Revision, Teaching lexically, The state of our profession Translation in language classes: tackling the taboo Translation is a fantastic tool for all language teachers to use in their classes. That might be a surprising statement from a native speaker teacher working in a multi-lingual teaching context in the UK. and to be honest it’s been a long and winding road that brought me to that view. Let me take you […]
