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!
For myself and many other ELT professionals, Stephen Krashen is a legend. In the words of Wikipedia, for instance ‘He is credited with introducing various influential concepts ... including the acquisition-learning hypothesis, the input hypothesis, the monitor hypothesis, the affective filter, and the natural order hypothesis’. So naturally, he is a big pull at a conference.
Carol Read’s plenary at TESOL France was titled, ‘Reflections on How to be a Highly Effective Teacher’. I’ve seen her give a number of conference presentations, but for me this was the best – a broad view of the field underpinned by good references, and a vivacious delivery.
This is a sample lesson from our book Authentic Listening Resource Pack (Delta Publishing). You will find the photocopiable lesson on PDF below, as well as the audio material as a downloadable mp3 file.
This is an authentic listening activity from a radio programme on the subject of ants. It is a sample lesson from our new book Authentic Listening Resource Pack (Delta Publishing).
Authentic Listening Resource Pack (Delta Publishing, Jan 2015) provides an invaluable bank of selected audio and video material offering authentic listening practice, essential in developing students’ listening skills in preparation for being exposed to “real” English.
Think you heard it all? Think again! Expert listeners don't hear it all. They hear what's needed and disregard the 'noise'. But L2 listeners have to learn what counts as 'noise' in the target language. It’s not the ‘difficult’ words that present the biggest problem; it’s the ‘easy’ ones that are pronounced in unexpected ways.
Mike McCarthy gave the opening plenary at English UK Academic (North) conference last Saturday (Oct 4 2014), revisiting the topic of the grammar of spoken English. Spoken language, he pointed out, is in no way an imperfect, poorly realized version of the written form.
