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Tag: everyday english

Meet learners’ needs by following language desire paths

Written by Andrew Walkley on . Posted in Exploiting Exercises, Grammar, Opinions, Teaching lexically, Uncategorized. No Comments on Meet learners’ needs by following language desire paths

If we want to meet learners’ needs, then try following their conversations and teach the language they desire rather than just what we set out to teach. Desire paths: a metaphor for meeting all the learners’ language needs while using a coursebook I was out walking the other day and it being somewhat damp and muddy, I decided to stick to the paved pathway rather than take this more direct route which I have now discovered is called a ‘ desire path’. But as I did so, I started thinking that the this kind of path, which you see all over the place, could be a kind of...

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Dictation and decoding

Written by Andrew Walkley on . Posted in Classroom Activities, Core Principles, Exploiting Exercises, Pronunciation. No Comments on Dictation and decoding

A long time ago I did a Diploma in TEFL and I remember a particular piece of feedback I was given after one of my observed lessons. In this lesson, I’d dictated a series of words to the students. Now, I can’t remember exactly what those words were or why I was dictating them, but I do remember my tutor saying it was ‘unfair’ on students to dictate words they didn’t already know . At the time, that seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to say and for many years after that, I didn’t really do any dictations of that nature again!  Unfortunately, this can sometimes be the power of...

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