Radio presenting tips for working on speaking
Here are a couple of tips for working on speaking skills that I have adapted from a workshop that I had recently. The focus was on the practical side of things: breathing and emphasis, and it was for...
View Article#throwbackthursday OMG I
A tale of mixed emoticons and a throwback to a lesson from back when I was teaching teenagers in a college
View ArticlePizza slices of my life
A quick and easy classroom activity based on people's lives, interests and thoughts, that I saw demonstrated by English for Action last year
View ArticleCrossroads
A model for working out where you are and where you're going or where you could go
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Google Maps + Language Plants
Give your learners Google Streetview, and without doubt they will look for their house. So says Phil Bird says, or words to that effect. And this can be a good thing. After all, as Phil suggests, get...
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Cinderella played football?!
Here is a quick idea for you. Images, and photos in particular, lend themselves terribly well to storytelling activities. You can make the most of this in the language classroom by taking the bare...
View ArticleTESOL Greece poster – Using sound to stimulate creativity
This weekend I’m at the TESOL Greece Annual Convention held in Athens. The link below will allow you to access an interactive version of my poster, titled ‘Using sound to stimulate creativity: the why...
View ArticleTutorial: how to make a ‘flip’ on #TEDEd
Here’s a short video tutorial about how to make ‘flips’ or online video-based lessons on the TED Ed website at ed.ted.com. If you have any questions, you can leave a comment below or shoot me a message...
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Quick activity for practising intonation and sentence stress
Here’s an idea I first saw demonstrated one afternoon while I was working a summer in a private language school and the teachers had gathered together to share an activity that they really liked using...
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Lexical gap fills – with a difference
This is a sort of stop-gap post, while I compose another one that will summarise a session about lexical sets I saw at IATEFL a couple of weeks ago. In a happily serendipitous, synergetic way this post...
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Prompts for Tuesday morning
As I’ve alluded to in a previous post, I am soon going to be starting a new job. So, Mike, will you have a bit of a break before you start in your new role? Well, you would have thought that this would...
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Framing your writing
In a way, this post is about something I won’t actually be able to use myself and isn’t something I have done extensively (or at least, consciously so) in the past. This week I start a new job, and I...
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Plan Bs
One of the things I often hear about in the English language teaching world concerns that dreaded ogre, observations. I know there are examples of good practice here, where observations are part of a...
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Letter writing in the past, present, and future
A letter to the future me from the past me read by the present me Something that at first seemed slightly weird happened to me recently: I received a letter, with the address written on the envelope in...
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