Author: Martin Sketchley (Page 1 of 4)

It is the start of the autumn semester – also known as the fall semester for those people from across the pond – here in South Korea. And this always leads me to think of different ways to get to know students in those crucial first lessons.

In this post, I am sharing five of my favourite first lesson activities to help develop that rapport and for learners to get to know you too. Let me know which are your favourite and how you get to know students in those first lessons in the comments.

Five years ago, during the height of the pandemic, I decided to activate my Preply profile and start dabbling in the world of freelance online teaching, while also working full-time, with the aid of the Preply platform. Five years later, I am still continuing to teach to students from around the world and I recently achieved having taught over 2,000 students on the Preply platform. In this post, I will share ten tips after teaching 2,000 students on Preply for new or experienced online tutors.

You may also watch a video which I created sharing these tips, which is available above. If you have not subscribed or watched my previous videos about the Preply platform, feel free to subscribe as I share regular videos whenever I get a chance.

Last Monday, I returned back to the classroom for an intensive English course that I was to teach for four days with Japanese high school students from Okinawa. Their aim was to improve their English academic skills but what did they want to do? Well, it was pretty clear immediately – they only wanted to have fun. This is essentially a personal reflection of what went well and what I would do differently next time with a closed group of Japanese high school students.

In this post, I will share my initial experiences and my reflections about how best to improve future closed groups of Japanese learners for intensive language courses. However, if you have any recommendations for what to include for next time, or how best to get high school students more engaged or chatty then please share in the comments.

Back in 2011, I was in the process of completing my dissertation: ‘An investigation into teacher and student attitudes of the key tenets of Dogme ELT’. The was first introduced to to the publication ‘Teaching Unplugged’, authored by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury, in 2010 when I wrote a review of this new book. Returning back to my original dissertation and action research, around 15 years later, I thought it would be best to share personal experiences and reflections post-dissertation (albeit 15 years too late).

Nonetheless, if you are interested in reading my dissertation, you are more than welcome to download. Unfortunately, it is unavailable from the University of Sussex library which I guess is related to the recent ethical guidelines that universities have to abide by these years. Anyhow, it is freely available below and you will see the time and effort I spent conducting quantative and qualitative research through the use of surveys with local language schools as well as speaking with teachers and transcribing these interviews.

I was incredibly fortunate to be invited to Seoul last weekend to act as publicity for Korea TESOL their International Conference in Seoul. If you are unaware, KOTESOL organises an International Conference every year around Spring, usually April or May, and they have many speakers and guests from around world. However, it was the first time that I had been to an international conference for many years, and also it being my first in South Korea.

In this post, I will be sharing some key takeaways from the weekend and reflecting upon the KOTESOL International Conference, while also acting as their official photographer from the event. If you were fortunate to have attended the annual conference, let me know in the comments.

Preply is possibly one of the most popular online tutoring sites available for many around the world. I had previously shared some of the thoughts about teaching or relying too heavily on the platform. Nonetheless, there are thousands of language tutors using the site each and every day, but there are also some important updates that Preply have shared recently. These particular updates are important as they directly impact anyone using Preply to either teach or learn a language.

For those that use Preply to tutor online, whether full-time or part-time, language teachers can be discovered by potential students based upon a variety of filters: language(s) taught, location of the tutor, cost, as well as a range of factors. One factor that can be used to find a reputable tutor is the ‘Super Tutor Badge’.

Last Friday, I was fortunate to have the chance to visit Seoul. It’s always nice to get away from the habits of one’s place, to explore elsewhere. Yet, it was more than just a weekend to visit Seoul, I attended the KOTESOL Connections last Saturday as well as to discuss the upcoming KOTESOL International Conference for 2026. It was also the perfect opportunity to use my new camera, in the field, and to capture some pictures while attending.

One of my previous posts I shared was more a current review about Preply as a platform and the growing concerns that I had regarding the reduced number of bookings that I had over the past number of months. However, since that honest and candid review, I received quite a lot of feedback from other tutors on the platform sharing their experiences which were rather similar in this regard.

I created a dedicated page on my website for potential students to book a trial lesson with me which gained some interest over the past few weeks and have already had a few bookings, but I have kept my Preply profile live with anything just in case.

In the video above, I shared a few thoughts about post-Preply with a scheduled lesson with a student but they never turned up. However, despite some of the challenges that I had encountered, there has been an improvement of late. In this post, I share some of my thoughts and reflections.