Recently, I was thinking about ways to use newspaper articles in the language classroom and it reminded me of suggestions that I came across during the period of my MA studies many years ago. With the growing reliance on digital articles and webpages, it is sometimes nice to go back to basics without any smartphones, automatic translation, or AI summarising tools.
In this post, I share five ways to use newspapers in the English language classroom and how best to make such heavy reading accessible for language learners. It is notoriously challenging for learners to become accustomed to reading newspaper articles in English, let alone their first language. When I speak to my students, few of them get their news from printed articles with more reliance on short form content such as Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. Anyhow, with such ideas, hopefully it offers improved accessibility towards newspaper articles for English students.
You can watch the YouTube video above where I detail all five ways to incorporate newspaper articles in the the classroom and Channel Members will be able to access a free lesson.
In our previous post, we looked at how best to create an online teacher introduction video but the next step to potentially getting students is to prepare and deliver a quality trial lesson. It is important for potential learners to get a taste of your online teaching. In this post, I will share how to prepare a 25 minute online demo lesson to students.
You may also want to watch the following video where I share the process of preparing updated demo lesson slides for use during the initial lesson with such potential students.
For YouTube Channel members, you can access a copy of the slides that I have created for trial lessons of 25 minutes.
For anyone who is wanting to teach English online, whether you are going to be teaching independently or for a platform, you will be required to create an introduction video. It can sometimes be a little overwhelming if you are unsure how best to create one, but in this post I will share the ultimate guide to creating an online teacher introduction video.
By following these steps in this post, you will learn how to plan, record, edit and create a professional and polished looking introduction video. I documented my process with the video above when I had to update my Preply introduction video.
Teaching English can be a thoroughly rewarding experience, which is why I have been involved in this profession for quite a while now. It obviously becomes natural for any professional educators to share websites that have guided their teaching and as I approach my 20th anniversary teaching English to international students, it seems fitting to share twenty influential English teacher websites to access in 2025.
Let me know which of the following English teaching websites that you consider crucial for newly certified English language teachers and any that you have discovered from this post.
The COVID-19 pandemic suddenly changed the teaching landscape, with many educators being forced to deliver lessons and courses online. To be honest, I cannot believe it was over five years ago since the pandemic. As many educators were forced to become accustomed to online teaching, despite their lack of experience, remote online education has gained recognition as a credible and respected alternative to face-to-face teaching.
Therefore, it is vital these days to have a reliable and professional setup for your online teaching needs regardless whether you are delivering hybrid classes, individual lessons or teaching solely online. In this guide, we will look at the tools and tech that are essential for online teachers which can help you teach more effectively and connect with students.
What ten books do you think are essential for English language teachers? Read on to find out!
When I first started teaching English in South Korea, back in 2005, I was unaware of teaching material. It was during a period when teaching in South Korea required the use of an undergraduate degree in any subject, a passport from a choice of English speaking countries (dictated no less by the Ministry of Education and the Korean authorities), and a passion to educate.
At no time did I consider getting any books to help with my language teaching – I earned my stripes learning what worked or what hadn’t with my students. I sincerely apologise all my Korean students from my ineptness as I experimented, failed (more often than not), and persevered. However, one advice that I have for anyone wanting to consider English Language Teaching, either online or face-to-face, is to invest in a small collection of books. It would certainly help in developing greater confidence within the teaching industry.
In this blog post, I share ten essential books all new English teachers need to succeed in the life of us such educators, and I still use them to this day. These books are not in any particular order, and would recommend them all if you can get them. Feel free to share what books should make the list in the comments, either in the video below or within this blog post.
Here is a YouTube video detailing the ten books that I would recommendContinue reading
I have been very fortunate to have taught English online to a variety of students, particularly with the Preply platform. Coincidentally, I have taught on-and-off with Preply for four years now, and it certainly helped during the pandemic. Fast forward from March 2020, and everyone seems to have jumped on the ‘online teaching bandwagon’ with many international institutions and organisations now singing the praises of how international students are able to connect with international teachers and now the entrance to online education is really now a laptop and a strong internet connection.
My response to an article published by the Guardian about English teachers employed to teach online courses for the British Council
This is in direct contradiction between how I approached the subject of online education during an international conference in Germany with other teacher training educators, and they dismayed online teaching as “not real teaching”. However, there is a growing regard for the skills required to teaching online – we only have to see Cambridge offering the online CELTA course or Nile ELT offering online courses to accommodate the growing need and desire to deliver online language courses.
The development of technology, not least since the pandemic, has made online lessons a more acceptable and reputable form of English teaching, and education has certainly gone on leaps and bounds. However, there is much to still learn as this is a relatively new field of language education, and many language teachers still need to develop the skills necessary to be able to deliver quality online lessons. However, how do we go about it?
When I was starting out as an English Language Teacher, there was a table of Teacher’s Core Competencies which Cambridge English had developed back in the early-2010s but nowadays I believe it is now renamed as the Cambridge English Teaching Framework. Not much has changed but it offered in-class teachers the opportunity to reflect and review their own teaching practices as language educators. Nowadays, Cambridge English envisage the Teaching Framework to:
help teachers to identify where they are in their professional career
help teachers and their employers to think about where to go next and identify development activities to get there.
Essentially there are five categories that attempt to connect with all elements of English teaching:
Learning and the Learner
Teaching, Learning and Assessment
Language Ability
Language Knowledge and Awareness for Teaching
Professional Development and Values
However, despite the five key components, which are incredibly thorough and well thought through, it appears to not have been updated to include aspects of online language teaching – not least after COVID-19. The core values and breakdown of the categories is available on the Cambridge English website to download, and you can also find out more information about how and why the categories were created.
The current competencies shared by Cambridge English do not necessarily include an aspect of online language teaching, as it can be obviously viewed rather differently compared to face-to-face language teaching. Looking at the Teaching Framework Summary linked above, common words related to online teaching have not been included (i.e., ‘technology’, ‘online’, ‘remote’, etc.). Therefore, I would suggest that the Teaching Framework should have been updated to include the already growing presence of online education and the many successful platforms that are now being used by reputable organisations such as the British Council.
On the one hand we have many institutions embracing online education, while on the other hand a perceived lack of professional standing for online education. It is perhaps about time that Cambridge update and modernise their Teaching Framework to accommodate the well-established online teaching industry to help fledging English teachers broaden their knowledge and awareness, rather than keeping things as they were pre-pandemic. This would aid the professionalism of the online teaching industry, draw interest from stakeholders curious about the teaching of English online, and potentially connect the online CELTA course to the main tenets of remote simultaneous education.
There are a few questions to ponder while continuing this conversation:
What are your thoughts and ideas about the acceptance of online language teaching post-pandemic?
To what extent is there a two tier policy between face-to-face and online English teaching?
How much is it a fallacy to disregard an already established online teaching industry?
Do you believe that there should be an improvement with the Teaching Framework to incorporate online English teaching?
When I first started teaching online back in 2014 with a variety of platforms based in China, most lesson material was rather dry and stale. Many of the educational platforms had their own material organised for lessons and I was required to deliver this rather questionable material to various students who were predominantly based in China.
Despite being involved in creating lessons for online platforms in 2018 and attempting to make more interesting and engaging content for students and teachers, it was still a little challenging to get such material accepted. These days, more entrepreneurial English teachers are attempting to carve out their own niche and offer a variety of courses. For those that use platforms to connect with students, some English teachers still seek out material to help them structure their online lessons, with websites available for teachers to help them with their lesson planning such as LinguaHouse, ESL Brains, and Fluentize.
In this post, I shall be sharing how I source and use LinguaHouse material for my online classes with an example of an intermediate English student based in Mainland China through the platform of Preply.
1. Sourcing Appropriate Material
When planning your lessons for students, it is important to find suitable material that would benefit the student. For example, if you are helping students to pass an examination such as IELTS, then finding relevant material would be beneficial. What I have discovered with LinguaHouse is that they organise material depending on the key focus for lessons, such as Business English, Exam Preparation or General English.
In the example video, I was looking for General English material for the student as they have no desire to pass an exam and are just wanting to develop their fluency. Therefore, I search for material which was more general and would engage the learner, despite the minimal preparation that I left myself for the lesson. As they had recently starting working out at a gym, I thought a sports-related worksheet would engage them.
2. Delivering Material
Once material has been sourced, the tutor must consider how best to go about delivering the content. In the video above, I briefly (perhaps a little too briefly) looked at the different tasks and considered there and then how best to get the student involved in the activities. Having taught the student previously and given a little more time on training them up to speed on the Preply whiteboard, I was confident that the student would be able to complete any tasks set before them with minimal disruption. I would always encourage tutors to consider the best approach and to give any time towards the delivery of any course content by asking the following questions:
Has the student completed any previous activities like this before?
Will the student be able to follow my instructions so that they can undertake any tasks set?
If I try anything new, is the student trained appropriately and effectively with the online tools?
If you are teaching students online, then a little training on the tools is a worthy investment later down the line as students should be able to complete a variety of tasks such as matching, gap-fill or marking stress patterns.
3. Reflect on Your Teaching
One thing that strikes me between teachers who are mediocre and great teachers is the ability for the latter to reflect on their craft. I was very candid with how my lesson went and was very quick at determining how little I prepared prior to the lesson. Perhaps I relied too heavily on the technology working without any anticipation for it not to be so. Anyhow, for those that seek to improve themselves as practitioners, reflection is crucial. The time when one stops reflecting is the time one decides not to be human. I am very candid with my experiences as I genuinely believe that it will improve my ability as a teacher, which is perhaps one reason I do not mind recording and sharing my lessons – I have nothing to hide and we are fortunate in this profession to be amongst many other great individuals.
I hope you enjoyed this post and apologies if this was perhaps a little too candid at times. It is just nice to share my experiences in the hope it benefits others. It was nice to share the material that I use from time to time with online students as well as how I deliver lessons. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
In the last post, I looked at two ideas to break the ice, but in this post I am sharing ten ideas for successful first lessons. It is incredibly vital to ensure that your first lessons are a success as this can either make or break the rest of the course with your students.
You can either watch the video above or read on for more detailed information.
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[…] our previous post, we looked at how best to create an online teacher introduction video but the next step…
Great suggestions Sketch, and thanks for the mention! I’d add Adri’s EAL blog which she still updates now and then:…
This is a great list. Thanks for including my blog on it :) I'd definitely add Jason Anderson https://jasonanderson.blog/ and…
We would all appreciate it if Cambridge provided us with an updated framework that reflects these changes (I correct my…