Articles in March 2012

Authentic Listening Step by Step

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Using authentic audio recordings

This article gives a step-by-guide for teachers who would like to use authentic audio recordings with B2-level students in the classroom. Along the way, it mentions the various challenges a non-expert listener might experience, and explains how we can devise confidence-building activities which address these problems.

Using Pictures in ELT

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"A picture is a text without words"

Images could be described this way: "A picture is a text without words". This is what makes them invaluable for the language classroom. They provide rich and immediate content, but they leave it up to the student how to put that into words. They can't 'cut and paste' as they can from a text. It doesn't put words in their mouths.

Short and Practical Pronunciation Teaching Ideas

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Publication: 
IATEFL Pronunciation SIG newsletter 'Speak Out'
series of practical teaching ideas

These are a series of practical teaching ideas which I have been contibuting to the IATEFL Pron Sig magazine 'Speak Out'. They cover a range of different pronunciation issues:
1. Contrastive stress
2. The final -s suffix - plurals, present simple, possessives
3. Consonant sounds /t/ and /d/ at the ends of words
4. Dividing text into tone units

Teaching Writing to School Children

Publication: 
IATEFL young learners sig journal CATS, Spring 2000
How do you teach writing to young EFL learners?

Writing has a bad reputation in many schools, for both teachers and students. For the teacher, it means marking a pile of compositions and they are almost always worse than expected. For many students, writing is a boring chore and an “opportunity” to make a lot of mistakes.However, we believe that writing can be a very interesting and involving activity for students of English.