ELT Experiences

Experiences of an English Language Teacher


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“50 Activities for the First Day of School”: Book Review

It is the first time that I have attempted to do a book review via video before and I decided the lucky book would be “50 Activities for the First Day of School” by Walton Burns. Watch the video below to find out more about the book and whether it would be useful for teachers.

Again, please let me know what book reviews I should do in the future. Again, a huge thanks to everyone who has been supporting my YouTube Channel – I now have over 42,000 minutes of watch time and over 12,000 views on my Channel. So a huge thank you to everyone.


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Daily TEFL Tips & Tricks: Blog Challenge

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You may have noticed that ELT Experiences have been a little quiet recently. Much of this is due to the fact that I have started a new blog: Daily TEFL Tips & Tricks. It is a new project/challenge of mine to write up a daily post to help out new or experienced teachers. Do not worry, ELT Experiences is not going anywhere soon and we still have a lot of ideas for developing videos towards book reviews – the next book review will be recorded! However, I felt that I wanted to challenge myself by writing up a post each day for a year filled with at least five tips or tricks on a certain topic and thought that this would be best achieved with a new blog dedicated to this.

I am now going to challenge other bloggers to do the same. The rules are simple and easy to achieve: write a daily blog post, not so many words, related to English language teaching or language learning for a year. After the year, you will have over 360 mini-posts on the day-to-day teaching or learning of English. The best thing is you don’t have to sit down each day and write something up day in and day out. Just write up a number of posts for the week, schedule to be published each day and then sit back and see how it goes.

So, what are you waiting for? Get your skates on!


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The Ultimate Way to Get Students Debating

Last Friday, I was fortunate enough to observe one of my colleagues teach her Intermediate class with no material what so ever. She told me that she was going to get her students debating in class. I have always had difficulty getting my students to communicate and I thought it would be a great chance to see how another senior teacher encourages learners to communicate and debate naturally. It was the first time that I had been able to take away some ideas for teaching for next time. What made it even more valuable was that I recorded the lesson with my video camera – with her consent.

What I really found useful was the fact that the teacher did not use any worksheets or handouts and used all the students in class to elicit possible pros and cons for the debate. Here are the stages for preparing learners to debate and follow a similar lesson structure.

  1. Elicit possible statements for agreeing and disagreeing
  2. Board up these statements on one side of the whiteboard
  3. Choose a topic and divide the class in half
  4. One half of the class think of positives of the topic and the other half think of negatives
  5. Pair a student who focuses on positives with a student who focuses on negatives
  6. Get the learners to use the functional language on the whiteboard
  7. Monitor for feedback at the end of the lesson and prompt learners to use the functional language
  8. Stop the debate and then get students to decide who in their group won the debate and why
  9. Repeat the debate again but with a different topic and pair different students together
  10. Provide feedback and end the class

This is a great activity for Pre-Intermediate learners and above. Try it out next time and see whether you got your students speaking. A huge thank you to Lisa for allowing me to record her lesson.

 


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How to Teach Dictogloss: Example Video

Earlier this week, I was teaching a wonderful afternoon class of elementary adult learners who were really enthusiastic and engaged. Their enthusiasm and commitment to communicate made up for their lack of language ability. I decided, for their second lesson, to tell them a story and made a dictogloss activity. The main focus for a dictogloss is for students to listen to the story a number of times and then, in a group, to rewrite the story using any of their notes. I was so pleased with their progress and the amount that they had written from my story.

If you are unsure what dictogloss is, then the video below will help how to incorporate into your future lessons.

Have you ever tried dictogloss before? Do you have any questions? If so, don’t hesitate.


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Workshop Video: “Top Tips for Young Learner Teachers”

Last week, I gave a talk on teaching young learners. Finally, I have managed to upload the video of this workshop and it is available for all my followers. The slides for this workshop is available here and please ‘Like’ it and ‘Subscribe’ for more updates. If you have a question, feel free to leave a comment on the video. Thanks for all the support.


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“Top Tips for Young Learner Teachers”: Teacher Training

I gave a teacher training session in Brighton earlier today, named “Top Tips for Young Learner Teachers“. The training session was around an hour and a half but there were plenty of things to keep everyone occupied. The training session was aimed for teachers, both experienced or those fresh of a CELTA Course, with relatively limited experience teaching young learners. The slides for this training session can be viewed below.

What tips do you have for teaching young learners? Do you have a favourite game? How do you like to start your lessons? As ever, leave a comment below.