I got my first teaching job in 1984, working at a large boy's secondary school in El Obeid, Sudan. This experience made it very clear to me that there's a lot more to teaching English than just being able to speak the language!
Too often, we treat writing as mere grammar practice. But writing is communication too. In this workshop, we will look at classroom tasks which focus on meaning and content in writing, and not just form. Lot’s of imaginative and creative ideas to take away!
In this talk I will highlight some patterns in English language classroom talk. I will suggest how these patterns arise, and what their implications are for language learning. I will conclude that it may be better not to talk like a teacher sometimes.
(I have also presented this talk at TEA (Canary Islands) and as a plenary at CETA (Cordoba, Spain))
English Teaching Professional, issue 40, September 2005
There are three distinct aspects of intonation:
1. Separating what you say into groups of words;
2. Stressing the most important word in each of these groups;
3. Ending each group of words with the voice going up or down.
In this article, we’ll look at simple, practical ways of presenting intonation from each of these three ‘takes’ in turn.
This article examines the code switching that goes on during group work in language classes in which the learners share an L1. The author argues that the discourse produced in these circumstances is layered as a result of the participants' oscillating between a literal and a nonliteral frame (Goffman, 1974).
In this workshop, we will look at how politeness works in English. We will see that there is more than one kind of politeness, and it varies according to the relationship of speaker to listener. We will consider the problems this may present for learners and try out some classroom activities for raising awareness of this aspect of language.
In this presentation, we will look at intrinsic motivation in the ELT classroom. I will suggest that for a lesson to generate intrinsic motivation, it should appeal not also to the student-as-learner but also the student-as-person.
"I've studied English for X years but I still can't use it". Sound familiar? It's what you get when you present language as a ladder of grammar rules rather than as communicative potential. If learners want to be able to use English, they need an action-oriented approach to language: developing communicative competences rather than just knowledge of form.
In this workshop, we will look at the pronunciation of grammar features including verb inflections, contractions, auxiliaries, part of speech and clause structure. We will see how the pronunciation of these features is particularly important for meaning, and can be easily integrated into course materials. We will look at ways of working on these areas of pronunciation.
