On the seventh day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me:  seven simple statements Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration!  Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way: 12 blogs worth clutching 11 tips for writing 10 tricks for reading 9 pretty pictures 8 talks worth ...

On the eighth day of Geekmas, some blogger gave to me:  eight talks worth watching Welcome to the teflgeek Christmas celebration!  Themed around the classic Christmas carol – but going backwards, mostly because it’s more like a countdown that way: 12 blogs worth clutching 11 tips for writing 10 tricks for reading 9 pretty pictures and eight ...

At first glance, the free-wheeling Dogme approach to teaching and formal assessment do not sit well together.  Rather they would appear to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum, representing as they do either “winging it elevated to an art form” or rigid rows of desks and standardized testing models.  The #eltchat on Wednesday 9th November 2011 ...

The wiki can be an often overlooked teacher tech tool.  The piece below is (as you might be able to tell!) an adapted version of an assignment submitted for the Technology & Language Learning module of my MA. This article provides an overview of the background and evolution of the wiki and examines some of the affordances generally associated with ...

One of the contributors to the debate on student fees in UK universities raised an interesting point the other week.  Roger Moss, in breaking down the fees students pay when compared to what they get, calculated that they paid approximately £92 per seminar.  What else, he wondered in his letter to The Independent, could they have spent the money ...

Simon Thomas answers the question “What causes ESL students to make speaking and writing errors? “ quite comprehensively in a recent blog post at efl-resource.com. He looks at the differences between “mistakes” (lack of knowledge or understanding) and “slips” (performance errors) – which I think is a distinction originally made by Pit Corder in ...

This was the question posed the other week on my MA discussion boards:  ”Based on your teaching experience, write down the criteria you think are essential for language learning.”  And it’s a good question.  In many respects the ultimate teaching question as it really gets down to the core elements of your pedagogical belief system – what do you ...

A fact that was brought home the other day when a training seminar got rescheduled because half the projected attendees didn’t have Interactive Whiteboard technology available to them….. So here’s a nice post from Vicky Saumell’s Educational Technology in ELT blog on 40 Things you can do with a Data Projector in an EFL/ESL lesson. Some of the ...

The Voxy Blog has an interesting infographic for teaching and teacher development, examining the question: “Are Flashcards an Effective Learning Tool?” .  I suspect most YL teachers (especially those at Primary level) are thinking “well duh” at this point. The infographic was developed at least partially in promotion of one of Voxy’s i-phone ...

  A colleague of great experience in both TEFL and the UK education system, and whose opinion I greatly respect, once asserted that TEFL was at the forefront of educational experimentation and research, formenting new pedagogical techniques and ideas and pushing the boundaries of what is meant and expected by the terms “teaching” and “learning”. ...