Yesterday I implemented the following activity with my adult students – all of them are retired people that wish to learn English for traveling and visiting different countries.  Basically it was a listening activity, but it also had speaking and reading parts. It requires several steps. We have not finished yet – I expect tomorrow or on coming ...

One day teacher of English A said to teacher of English B, “We’ve been talking a lot about teaching and learning English in this blog – which can be applied to any other modern language. Have you ever thought that language is something between two people – at least. I guess it’s sound to focus on this point now. Two people at least, ok, but, what ...

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “When we communicate with one another we do it by using the four skills of a language: listening, speaking, reading and writing. So it is sensible you make your students practice those four skills. Your students will be gaining experience by using them. Our students don’t only read and ...

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “An activity you can implement in your classes of English is related to reading; shortly speaking, look. Can be great. If you’ve got, say, five days of classes of English per week (would be ideal!), you could dedicate one class entirely to reading, either an abridged simplified ...

I’m not a great fan of “festivals” teaching in general, but this year my timetable has more young learner classes than usual and halloween is almost upon us, so here’s what I managed to find to help you cook up some devilish lessons for your learners… ESL-Galaxy has it’s usual great selection of flashcards, crosswords, wordsearches ...

Inspired by a recent feature on The Guardian website, which invites readers to share their memories of where they were and what they were doing (click here for more detail), I was thinking about collating teaching resources on the topic and presenting them here. Turns out Larry Ferlazzo‘s beaten me to it… His latest post:  ”Even more 9/11 ...

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 ...

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 ...

For many teachers, though the school year might have just ended – the joy of summer school classes is about to start.  Or may have already, but I think lessons at my habitual summer haunt are due to begin on Monday morning – I’m not there this year, so not sure. In any event this post contains a collection of getting to know you type activities / ...

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 ...