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Tag: teaching languages at low levels

How should I use my coursebook? With principles!

It seems that most teachers see the value of using a coursebook, but the bigger question is: how should I use them? That was my conclusion from reading a recent post on LinkedIn by Katherine Bilsborough. She asked for English language teachers who were anti-coursebook to explain why they were against using them. As it turned out, most of the comments weren’t really anti-coursebook at all – maybe because they were from people connected to Kath, who is … a coursebook writer! However, I think this is just how the majority of teachers view coursebooks. There are those who loudly rant about the...

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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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Back in class: thoughts from learning and teaching languages at low levels

During the eighteen months of writing the new edition of Outcomes I put my teaching and language learning efforts on hold. Back in January 2022, when we started the project, I was teaching a beginner Spanish class and learning Russian, but it quickly became clear that my addled brain was not going to do multi-tasking very well, so the lessons came to an end.  Now Outcomes is finished and I’m back in the classroom. I’m teaching a low-level Spanish class with a colleague at Lexical Lab and also starting again with Russian as what I guess you might describe as a false beginner. In both...

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