My teaching career began in Liverpool, way back in 1979, where I worked as a secondary school teacher of History. I taught all ages and levels, but found myself particularly intrigued by the challenges of pupils who seemed to lack motivation.
With increased mobility in the European Higher Education Area, many teachers are now finding that they have students from different cultural backgrounds in their classrooms. Additionally, many English language teachers might be finding that they are now teaching students who are aiming to study a part of their degree, through the medium of English, in a different country.
In this second TESOL SPAIN article on the Common European Framewrok of Reference (CEFR), I consider the scaling of communicative proficiency using traditional lables (for example Elementary or Pre-intermediate) and CEFR levels (A1, A2, etc.).
This is the first of two aticles, written to provide contextual background for the TESOL SPAIN 25th National Convention, theme: Access Europe: Language as a Common Currency.
The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) is an indispensable tool for the realisation for the Bologna Process in the European Higher Education Area. It offers guidance for teaching, learning and assessment of languages for communication purposes.
Nowadays, the internet gives us easy access to audio (and audio-visual) recordings, and, naturally, many learners of English will want / need / try to listen to some of what’s available. However, and despite the amount of time spent ‘doing’ listening in the language classroom, they will often feel frustrated when they try to follow such recordings.
“English for Beach Entrepreneurs: Reflecting upon an ESP course” (Patricia Elizabeth Perez Martins, Claudia Rebello dos Santos Santos)
Patricia began by taking us through the standard stages of ESP course design for this 25 hour course, and then Claudia described course implementation, adaptation and learning results.
We're busy adding material following the BRAZ-TESOL conference.The talks "Pronunciation games for Brazil" and "Silent Stories: using pictures in ELT" now include videos from audio files recorded at the event, and we are busily writing up summaries of various wor
This plenary linked the conference theme Proud to be to the ultimate goals of language learning today. With images of well known bridges around the world, and drawing on expressions related to water (for example, don’t rock the boat and take the plunge), Kathy explained a comprehensive set of communication strategies.
Christine Coombe gave the opening the plenary on Tuesday morning: her topic – 10 Characteristics of Highly Effective EF/SL Teachers; her purpose – to get us reflecting on our own criteria for effectiveness and to self-evaluate accordingly; her idea – that we might identify areas of our teaching that we might want to work on.
A pairwork activity in which students and their partners describe their pictures and find the differences. The pictures are so designed as to contextualize and elicit the present perfect tense, such as 'I've failed my exam'.
