I was fortunate enough to be invited to give a talk for the Korea TESOL Association about action research which I conducted over the summer months in relation to the challenges of teaching remotely. The talk included an overview and results of the research as well as practical tips for teaching different skills or functions remotely. A huge thanks to the KOTESOL Association for their support for the webinar and the recording is now available to watch in case you wish to learn more.
If you wish for me to provide a webinar in relation to teaching remotely, then please get in touch with the form below. I am also considering doing a weekly live webinar training session for teachers, so let me know if there is any interest with this.
A teacher training session looked at 20 ways to make your lessons more exciting and engaging. Please find below a video of the training session, the PowerPoint slides as well as a Handout which was provided to each of the attendees.
Last week, I was inducting some new teachers into our school: preparing them for their teaching career for the year ahead. We looked at various areas about teaching: classroom management, get to know you activities, games in the classroom, etc. The final area we looked at was about continuing professional development (CPD). We looked at formal and peer observations, attending workshops, contributing to workshops as well as blogging. All teachers with varying years of experience, including a teacher who had just completed her CELTA (or equivalent), had only come across the mainstream websites related to English language teaching (TEFL.com, Dave’s ESL Cafe or Teaching English) yet had not really considered blogging a tool for CPD.
I recorded this lesson at my work of a fellow teacher preparing learners with functional language for debates and expressing points of view. It was a great lesson and I was so grateful being able to observe and record such a valuable lesson. I now thought that I will share this lesson with you all to see how my colleague is able to engage, motivate and support learners during a lesson. Enjoy!
On 8 October 2016, I gave a workshop at the University of Brighton as part of the IATEFL PronSIG event. It was a great event and there were some wonderful talks. Unfortunately, I had to leave at 3pm. As has been requested, I have shared my slides for my talk. I hope that these are useful and I will be uploading a video of the workshop in the next few days. Many thanks for the kind words and don’t forget to ask any questions below.
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.
A few years ago I wrote a blog post about 10 Websites for English Language Teachers. At the time it seemed to be quite popular with readers but it suddenly dawned that I did not write about any websites which would be best suited for learners of English. So read on to find out the 10 websites which I recommend for learners of English.
1. ESOL Courses
This wonderful self-study website, ESOL Courses, is great for students as all lessons are available online, there is no registration so lessons are free and they cover a range of areas as well as levels. I was first introduced to this website when I met Sue Lyon-Jones and she was referring to this website. I would definitely recommend students to look at this website and do some of the lessons in their spare time.
2. BBC Learning English
I have been using the BBC Learning English website since I first started English language teaching in South Korea. I always used to refer my students to it so that they could develop their own listening and vocabulary skills in their own time. The website has obviously developed and improved over time and there are now videos and activities.
3. Five Minute English
This website, Five Minute English, was one that I came across by accident and it contains quite a number of lessons which focus on listening, grammar, vocabulary as well as a range of other skills. It is fantastic and students can look at this website in their free time. The website is basic but content is good for students to study a little bit more after lessons and is invaluable for those students who have very little time for self-study.
4. ESL Podcast
This website, ESL Podcast, has small listening lessons for students to learn vocabulary and idiomatic expressions related to a particular theme. When students look at the lesson, there is a script. There are not any activities but it is just an additional opportunity for learners to improve their listening skills in their own time.
5. English Page
English Page is an engaging learner focused website which offers areas of study with grammar, vocabulary as well as weekly lessons. It is a useful website with exercises within the website so students do not have to download or print activities. This can reinforce what is being studied during lessons.
6. Flo-Joe
Flo-Joe has been around for years and I was introduced to it when I was working in Korea as it was the go-to website as lessons were associated with Cambridge ESOL Examinations and it still is. It is still an invaluable website for those learners that are preparing for examinations such as the PET, KET, FCE or any other Cambridge ESOL focused examination. Students will develop a lot of exam skills and they will be able to use this in their free time.
7. English at Home
English at Home is a great website for students as there is a focus on spoken English, vocabulary and grammar. There are lessons available but most of the activities are basic ‘choose the correct answer’. However, it is a useful website that students could use to refer to during their selfstudy.
8. DuoLingo
You cannot write a blog post for learners of any language who wishes to study in their own time without mentioning the great DuoLingo website/application. I have this on my phone whenever I feel inspired to study French or German. However, there are courses for students whose first language is not English but wish to selfstudy English. For example, a South Korean student can access DuoLingo and learn English with the ease of using their L1. You should definitely recommend your learners to access this website on their smartphones or on their laptop.
9. Breaking News English
This is a wonderful website for students who wish to learn more about what is happening around the world, with regular updates to Breaking News English by Sean Banville. Students have free access to all lessons and activities as well as the audio. Students may need some support and introduction to the website but you could always get learners to complete a listening activity as part of their homework and then share their experiences of learning through this website.
10. University of Victoria Study Zone
The University of Victoria has free access to a Study Zone and learners may benefit from the numerous online lessons. It is primarily aimed for students from the University of Victoria. This website has a lot of resources available for students with a focus on grammar, vocabulary and reading. It does require a bit of learner training but once students have developed confidence with the website, it could supplement lessons quite nicely. Lessons are organised into levels and there is also a grammar index.
As an idea for getting students to become more aware of online content to complement their studies, I try to show the websites in class with a class set of laptops or Chromebooks, students then choose a lesson, from one of the websites, to complete during the lesson. After they have completed a lesson, they then chat to their partner about the website and for homework I organise students to write about their thoughts of the self-study content and a review with a Google Drive document, which can then be shared to all other learners when they return to class another day.
What are your favourite websites to get students to learn English outside of the classroom? Do you recommend any that have not been mentioned here? Do you have any activities that you incorporate in class to supplement learner autonomy and training?
*An update to this post and to all my readers. I was nominated and successfully won the delightful Teaching English Blog of the Month Award. A huge thanks to everyone at the British Council for their support and massive thanks to all my readers, colleagues and friends for their help. To receive recognition for the work that I do and the blog that I maintain is fantastic, so a big thank you to everyone.
It has been an incredibly busy year at work and home. Unfortunately, the biggest problem this has created is the lack of opportunity to blog more consistently. The flip side is that what I have written – which I aimed to be more practical and supportive for English language practitioners – was practical with some ideas for readers to incorporate in their own class. I have decided to review five of the most popular posts from this year.
This was initially written to answer some of the questions which my Facebook Group is constantly faced with: “What books do I purchase for the CELTA?“. It seemed rather popular with over 7,000 visitors checking this post out and commenting on it as well. Many thanks for finding this a useful post.
Another popular post was, again, CELTA-related dedicated for those wishing to undertake a CELTA (or equivalent initial teacher training) course. It followed the most popular format on my blog by offering small nuggets of information which the reader could digest and use.
This post was more practical and aimed for current teachers of English. When I wrote this, I was always looking for a different way to introduce target language and wanted to be as creative as possible. In the end, I thought it would be worthwhile to put some of my ideas down and share with my readers.
At our school, we were going through a process of observing teachers and during this time, I thought about some of the lessons that I had observed with teachers with years of experience but was still left scratching my head with questions such as “Why did you do that?” or “What did the students get out of the lesson?”. I decided to get some things straight by sharing some things to consider when you, I or anyone else has a lesson observation. Read the post for more information.
In our school, we had some in-house teacher training sessions and one was the idea of using QR Codes as part of lessons. After the training session, I decided to get back to the drawing board and by writing up some lesson ideas to accompany the session and share with my teachers in our school. It seemed so worthwhile and, as has experienced, some of the teachers needed a helping hand on how to create the QR Codes and what to do with them. Thus, after I created a handout to share, I decided it was worthy of a blog post and decided to share with my readers. I hope you found it worthy.
So these were the most popular posts for 2015. What was your most popular post on your blog? Nevertheless, apologies for my lack of writing this year. It is one of my aims for 2016 is to write more often and to engage more with you, the readers.
What would you like to see next year? Are there any areas of teaching you would like to me to cover? Thank you for deciding to visit my blog over the year and I do hope you found it useful.
I was fortunate to attend the English Teaching Professional Live Conference this year, which was held in Brighton – so just a short train journey to the event. I arrived, collected my badge and was given a wonderful goody bag filled with various books and other things. There were 11 speakers at the event which included Chia Suan Chong, Antonia Clare, Jeremy Harmer, Mike Hogan, Philip Kerr and Ken Wilson, so I was spoilt for choice on which talk I would attend. It was quickly decided that I would attend talks based on personal importance and those that were possibly necessary for my school.
Thus, I decided to attend Jeremy Harmer’s opening talk “Sacred gift or faithful servant? Focus and creativity in the classroom”, followed by Dennis Davy’s talk “London calling – practical ideas on how to use London (or any city) as the theme of a series of lessons”, then Philip Kerr with “The brave new world of adaptive learning”, next with Anna Musielak’s talk with “How to incorporate drama, games, literature and popular culture into the classroom”, then Chia Suan Chong’s talk on “Creating the right impression – the politeness and pragmatics of EFL” and finally with Ken Wilson on “Ten ways to get your students to DO something”.
“Sacred gift or faithful servant? Focus and creativity in the classroom”: Jeremy Harmer
The opening of English Teaching professional Live 2014, in Brighton, was started by Jeremy Harmer. As usual, he was incredibly energetic during the talk and started the conference by giving a quote by Sheryl Crow on what she has sacrificed for her music, which was her love life, but she also said, during a Guardian interview “I think whatever you give your attention to is what thrives”. Jeremy attempted to link ‘more heart and more creativity’ in the classroom by focusing on what you love doing: teaching. However, before answering this question, Jeremy wanted to remind attendees of the conference of important issues in teaching such as prompting creativity and attention in the classroom as well as demanding more from your learners.
Jeremy also, having been to various of his talks, linked musical practice to repetition in language learning which would then prompt automaticity. There was a nice spin with the improvisation of jazz music with lexical chunks, with jazz musicians knowing over a hundred licks which could then be included during improvisation. The obvious metaphor was that learners should have a bank of lexical chunks which they could pepper their speaking with to sound more fluent. There was also another link with musical practice and English language teaching, which I had not thought about before, where Jeremy attempted to link ‘deliberate practice’ and ‘mindless practice’ with an emphasis that deliberate language practice is more cognitively important, where mindless language practice is unsuitable for any teacher and learner. He finally suggested areas to improve focus and creativity in the classroom, such as demanding learner focus, seizing the teaching moment, providing CLIL-based tasks, etc.
It was wonderful start to the conference and it is always a pleasure to see Jeremy give such an enthusiastic and thought provoking talk.
“London calling – practical ideas on how to use London (or any city) as the theme of a series of lessons”: Dennis Davy
The second talk that I attended was by Dennis Davy on using cities, with him offering London as an example, to develop cultural awareness and interest in language teaching. There were various ideas offered by Dennis and it was nice to see that a teacher based in France was keen to incorporate cities into their repertoire of lessons.
The talk started with Dennis getting attendees to think of famous poets, musicians, painters, etc that were related to London. There were numerous ideas of this shared in the room and then we moved on to the teaching of cities. Dennis mentioned that the course that he developed in France was 30 hours in length and was loosely CLIL related. The content of the course was negotiated by the learners and his learners were academics with the main aim to develop cultural awareness and cultural competence.
Dennis suggested different practical ideas which could be incorporated to practice the various skills of English:
Speaking: presentations, discussions, spoken commentaries on paintings, etc
The talk was invaluable for those teachers that had not considered teaching with the focus on cities, but there were a few questions from attendees enquiring whether students would be ‘sold’ on this idea of teaching, how student progress could be measured during the course and what the assessment criteria would involve. Nearer the end, I felt that Dennis was giving a commentary of his slides as he was showing slide after slide of painters and paintings, and unfortunately I started to switch off. I did come to this talk to see what could be included in the classroom not to see numerous slides of paintings, architecture, etc. However, it was a good chance to reflect on what our school could develop or deliver by developing learner interest in cities or places of interest within the classroom, prior to our learners visiting these places.
“The brave new world of adaptive learning”: Philip Kerr
Philip Kerr’s talk was about adaptive learning and it was the first time that I had come across the term ‘adaptive learning’. Adaptive learning is online computer education which amends the delivery of teaching material based upon the answer provided by the learner. Kerr painted a picture of the industry of English language teaching which was slowly becoming more and more reliant on technology with publishing houses focusing solely on adaptive learning applications to supplement and complement coursebooks. He gave a first-hand account on how a large publishing house had spent their budget on the technology rather than focus on the content in the coursebook and the project had to be shelved in the end.
The second part of the talk looked at the replacement of teachers with technology and interestingly I read an article a number of days previously about teachers being replaced by technology and it is a worrying proposition by educational institutions. Despite the debate of technology versus teachers, the big global institutions are able to drive their market to affect language teachers and schools. The final focus of the talk by Kerr, focused on the development of learning management systems which were being developed and used for English teaching institutions such as Macmillan Campus and Pearson MyLab and Philip proposed that ‘technology in the classroom is offering a solution for no problem’. Although the talk was of any practical nature, Philip maintained interest in the industry of English teaching that it was as useful as any other talk during the day.
“How to incorporate drama, games, literature and popular culture into the classroom”: Anna Musielak
Anna’s highly practical and invaluable talk was wonderful and it was so nice to go to such a talk and take away so many ideas which could be incorporated into the classroom. She started the talk by asking attendees what we could do with drama, pop culture and/or literature with many ideas include:
Drama: role-play, body language, etc
Pop Culture: entertainment, instagram, etc
Literature: Shakespeare
Anna provided examples of the different valuable games and activities which teachers could use in class. Some of the best ideas which were proposed included:
Grab a slip: a pair of students are acting in a scene, the example at the talk was about the weather, and then when the teacher blows a whistle or claps, the students then have to grab a piece of paper and try to use the phrase as naturally as possible for the context. Obviously, Anna created some funny phrases for the conversation and topic and both people demonstrating the activity were in hysterics. I would like to use this activity in the near future with my young learners and you can change it from phrases to words or people, etc.
Snowball fights: everyone at the session wrote a question on the piece of paper, rolled it into a ball and then we threw them around the conference hall. When Anna blew her whistle, we all picked up a paper ball and then wrote an answer to the question. I would love to do this activity for get to know you activities and will use this in the future.
Talk gibberish: a pair of student work together and then one student is talking gibberish or some old literature like Shakespeare and then the other student is now translating in more modern and up to date English.
Cheering corrections: Anna told attendees of an engaging and interesting idea of correcting learners through the use of cheering or booing. If an answer is incorrect, students should boo, and if it is correct, students should cheer. It was a nice and engaging way of maintaining learner interest in the highly useful area of learner feedback.
Anna’s talk was really useful and I would recommend any teacher to attend her talk in the future. She has some wonderful ideas which young learner, or adult, teachers could incorporate straight away into the classroom.
“Creating the right impression – the politeness and pragmatics of EFL”: Chia Suan Chong
Chia’s talk on politeness in English was a very educational and helpful talk. Chia initially shared her experiences of being considered ‘rude’ and ‘impolite’, when she asked her housemates, “Can you take the rubbish out please!”, in a very direct and loud way – which is often considered rude and impolite. She introduced the concept of English as a Lingua Franca, known as ELF, and Kachru’s 3 circles of world Englishes. This reminded me of my MA studies when I was looking at ELF and a Lingua Franca Core (LFC) by Jennifer Jenkins. The great thing about this talk was that research had been conducted, with Chia sharing the results of this. What she had done was record a day on the front desk at IH London and then go through the recording and transcribe this, then finally interview what was considered polite and impolite.
It was a very useful talk, with Chia demonstrating important areas of ELF: pronunciation, politeness, etc. We finally looked at the ‘impressions of (im)politeness’ through the use of a video and being asked what was impolite about the situation in the video and then comparing it with a similar situational video.
“Ten Seven ways to get your students to DO something”: Ken Wilson
The closing talk was by Ken Wilson and it was the first time that I was going to see a talk by him. He proposed seven, not ten, due to time restriction, ways to get students involved in the classroom and getting them to do things. It was a very useful and practical end for the last session of the conference. His seven strategies included:
Make your students curious: what do you think this person is?
Challenge them: a 7 second reading challenge – what can you remember?
Teach unplugged (Dogme): abandon your plan and see what happens.
Let them use their imagination: personalise the lesson and content.
Do something just for fun: an active role-play – “What time is it?”
Turn your class into a spider web: throw out answers back to the students and see if they agree or disagree.
Be enthusiastic: if you walk into a class looking pretty miserable, your students will be bored and not want to be there.
It was a quick and paced talk with attendees having to do various activities during the session and before we knew it, that was the end of the talk. It was so useful.
The talks were so useful and I really felt that I had acquired new practical ideas which I could incorporate into the classroom. I was so happy to have met so many other teachers who were incredibly motivated and enthusiastic about teaching and I would highly recommend teachers to attend the next ETp Live event.
Last Friday, I gave a teacher training session on “Instructions in the Classroom”. I had been reading an awful lot about instructions and tried to plan a good training session for these two recently qualified CELTA teachers and it was the first time that I covered this area of classroom management. There was a good selection of blog posts that I had read recently about instruction giving and a highly invaluable blog post written by about preparing an instruction training session.
Here is a breakdown of what happened during the training session:
I introduced the topic of the training session and the usual aims. I started off the session by giving my teachers some really bad, wordy and poorly designed instructions: “What I would like you to do is stand up … but not yet [they sit back down again] … you need a pen and you both need to go to this side of the room. Sorry … just one person to this side of the room and you sit down here! You need a piece of paper … do you have a piece of paper? On this err … this paper … just write down some … err ideas or things about err …” – you get the idea. I asked the teachers to make a list of good and bad instructions and work together. Hopefully, my really bad instructions inspired my teachers to create a good list.
The teachers sat down together for about three minutes and noted down some ideas: “Eye contact with students”, “Gestures”, etc. I then showed some ideas that I had from my PowerPoint (please refer to this below).
I then handed out some coursebook activities (roleplays, listening, speaking, etc) and asked the teachers to prepare their instructions for a minute. The teachers were recorded by my smartphone and then we listened to this playback and then they each gave each other peer feedback.
After a few turns, I then gave each teacher an activity to prepare instructions on the spot with no prior preparation. This seemed to work quite well and the teachers were getting into giving instructions to a group of ghost students.
The teachers were then asked to consider ICQs to supplement the instructions and for each activity given previously. The teachers prepared their ICQs and then peer feedback was given again.
Next, I showed the teachers some advice regarding ICQs (“Always prepare a question where the answer is either x or y”, etc). They noted this down briefly.
The following activity was looking at gestures in the classroom. I got the teachers to consider suitable gestures to include for common areas: “Listen to me!”, “Please repeat that”, etc. They were all standing up and they looked as if they were traffic cops or going through a dance routine.
Finally, I handed out some additional reading and referred to some books to consider looking at in their free time. Reading included teacher training books as well as blog posts (links are provided below).
The PowerPoint slides are available to view via Slideshare (embedded below) and if you have any questions regarding this training session, please do not hesitate to contact me. Otherwise, you can ask a question in the comment’s section below.
[slideshare id=34020948&sc=no]
Additional Reading:
Some of the following blog posts are incredibly helpful if you would like to check a bit more about instructions and ICQs. They were really helpful when I was preparing the training session and I also referred my teachers to these blog posts.
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Thanks for the suggestions! Much appreciated.
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