ELT thoughts, news and updates

Here's another phrasal homophone image to add to the collection. It's the homophone of 'A great idea!'.

Sugata Mitra argued with evangelical flourish that, given the right resources, children will learn without schooling. He said that the right resource has now come into existence and is potentially available to every child: the internet. To support this argument, Mitra described what have become known as “the hole in the wall” experiments.

In this plenary, David Graddol delved into the murky world of the English teaching business, where the imperative is firmly profit over people. He asks, ‘Who benefits from English teaching?’, and answers, ‘Follow the money!’. On that basis, it’s clearly not teachers and learners who benefit.

I think of the world of ELT as a map divided into four quarters – the content of what we teach – the English language; the reasons why the students are learning – their needs; how people learn – pedagogy; and the procedures we use to teach – methodology.

For awareness of pronunciation features including sounds and spelling, and features of connected speech, for B1 upwards: put this poem on the board and ask students to read it and work out what it's all about. Here's what happened when I tried: they all looked totally blank. One or two asked for vocab items, like 'gee!', which I then explained.

Ray Parker argued that, regarding stress-timing and rhythm, we have tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The notion that natural spoken English has a regular rhythm, he says, has been discredited by the research, but our response has been to abandon both that, and any attention to stress-timing.

Take a trip round the Map of Motivation. This is a tour designed specifically for English language teachers who find the whole conceptual area of motivation a bit diverse and difficult to hold in your head all at once. Just click on the movie below, and please give us any feedback that occurs to you, ideas for improvement and so on!

The 18th May NATESOL NATESOL Teacher's Conference in Worsley, Manchester, UK will feature the following line-up:

Rachel’s was one of several talks at this year’s IATEFL which sought to redress the balance in the coursebooks versus Dogme dichotomy. Others included Hugh Dellar and Herbert Puchta. Her principle claim is that you don’t have to choose between using a coursebook or letting the language ‘emerge’ from interaction in the classroom – you can do both.