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.
In the current issue of Modern English Teacher, http.//www.onlinemet.com, there's a very informative, useful and convincing article by Sheila Thorn on 'Debunking Authentic Listening (MET Vol 21, No 2, pgs 65-69) in which she puts the case for using authentic listenings in the classroom.
Pictures are like silent stories. Silent because they are non-verbal. Stories, because they are pregnant with content to talk about. For these two reasons alone, they are extremely useful in English language teaching. In this talk, we explain these and more advantages of pictures, as well as demonstrating different activity types for use in the classroom.
Want to know about a new blues band's first visit to Spain? Justin Coe tells us about the band, their music and reviews their recent concerts in Madrid and Barcelona.
In this personality test, students choose the option which best represents their attitude in various situations. From this, they 'discover' whether they are driven more by rationality or emotion.
In this activity, students get the chance to play Sherlock Holmes! They look at the evidence in a picture and try to work out what the owner of the bag did during the last few days. It's an enjoyable way to get some elementary level practice in using the simple past tense.
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.
This picture story is from Pen Pictures 2. It helps students learn to structure their writing - each Part of the story corresponds to one 'step' in the classic narrative structure situation-problem-solution-conclusion.
This is a fun way to introduce the topic and vocabulary area of describing people. It is a sample activity from English Result Intermediate by Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald (Oxford University Press)
