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Tag: Teaching A2

Low level activities to revise vocabulary: what to choose

To learn words students need to recall and use them multiple times, so it is good to have activities to revise vocabulary in class. In this post I look at choosing items to revise and what difference low levels makes on this and the tasks we do.Not just vocabularyThe first thing to say is that I think we should encourage students to think that when they revise vocabulary they also revise grammar. This is particularly true at the lowest levels where so many words are what might be described as grammar words and others have a an overall conceptual meaning that allows for a huge number of...

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Aiming for average

An amazing feat, but that’s allI recently watched  Nyad – a new film about the super-endurance swimmer Diane Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida. I like these kinds of stories, and the achievements they depict are often pretty amazing – but I’m turned off if they are presented as models of how to achieve things in life, which is exactly what happens at the end of Nyad. I buy these stories as entertainment, but I don’t buy into the lessons that are supposed to be learnt: “Look at me and learn how anything is possible if you just believe in yourself”, “Follow your dreams and give...

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