Calling all Business English Teachers – this one’s for you! The IATEFL BESIG, in conjunction with CUP’s Professional English Online website, are running a Lesson plan competition. It’s open to all (as long as you haven’t had materials previously commercially published) and the deadline is 31st January 2012. Thanks again to Cherry M. Philipose ...

It’s not until someone goes that you realise the impact they had on your life – Steve Jobs was one of those public figures who inspired belief and achievement in others. One of my classes was asking if we could talk about Steve Jobs and his life, and clearly he meant a lot to a lot of people – so here are some resources that you can use with your ...

I just came across, during a further exploration of the Pearson ELT Community site, their idioms discussions space. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of discussion, but they have posted a set of mini-videos which purport to explain English idioms and expressions.  The videos are very short (about a minute) and are followed with a ...

Back in July I posted a selections of 20 ideas and activities that might be worth trying out as you get to know your new classes this school year – and since then there’ve been a couple of additional ideas to throw into the mix: First Lesson Ideas / Warmers First Lesson: Find Nobody Who… First Lesson: I don’t know what you did last ...

I spotted this one on a post on the TeachingEnglish | British Council facebook page – who in turn spotted it on the Voxy Blog. The infographic below comes out of the work of Mark Prensky and his concepts of Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants – and looks how digital natives might fit into existing education systems (or not as the case may ...

A very quick alternative to the standard composition task “What I did on my Summer holidays”. Essentially, you ask the learners to write the composition (100 words? I guess length will be age & level dependent) about somebody else in the class. I think I’ve blogged a similar activity at some point before, but not sure when.  Anyway, the key to ...

This is an alternative approach to the inevitable “what did you do on your holidays” conversation.   Many first lesson activities and ideas are based on the premise that nobody knows anybody else but often the students in your classes have come up through the levels together and the only new person in the group is you… It should also combat those ...

This is an entry for everyone currently working at an ELT summer school somewhere in the world!  It’s not always easy and there’s a lot of hard work – hopefully this post will help out a bit!  I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy my summer school experiences immensely over the years and one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing most has been the project ...

Following on from the recent blog challenge on raising awareness of disability access issues, I came across the Leonard Cheshire Disability campaign whilst watching Shaun the Sheep dvds with my daughter. The campaign is called “Creature Discomforts” and has very similar aims to the blog challenge – namely to get people to think about the way ...

An interesting post by Deborah Capras on the Business Spotlight blog relating to Microsoft’s recent billion dollar purchase of Skype.  She raises the question: Doesn’t $8.5 billion seem a lot of money for a verb I use almost every day for free? Which is a really good question and got me thinking….   How much are words ...