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July 2018

elt books about teaching speaking

Teaching Speaking

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The stages of a lesson allow for a holistic approach to productive skills such as speaking. In a lesson with the objective of practicing speaking, there are typically the three stages of “pre”, “while” and “post”.

how children learn, learning theories and children

How do children learn? Ideas we need to know for teaching young learners

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Chances are that at some point in your teaching career, you will teach or will have taught children. I had the classic scenario of starting with adults and slowly but surely being given classes with younger and younger students, until one day I realised that I was almost entirely a young learner teacher. Thing is, I never got any clear guidance in all that time as to how that should have been affecting my teaching. How do children learn? Were there any learning theories I should know about?

Children playing in water sprinkler

Homo Ludens? Learning and play in the language classroom

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Well known author and teacher developer Jim Scrivener spoke to me in an interview a couple of years ago about focusing on where learning is happening. He claims that we devote  lot of time as teachers to almost ritualistic teaching acts to engage and entertain students. In this article I go on to explore this idea further.

Young Learners Listening

Teaching Listening

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Listening skills are complex and we need to consider more than just what a coursebook may provide. We also need to rethink the classic TESOL/TEFL techniques that we learned in our CELTA course and roll out by default. Authentic materials and situations are key as well as scaffolding that is thoroughly applied to the actual learners and the learning happening right in front of you.

Phonemes for CELTA and DELTA

Teaching Pronunciation and Phonetics

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“Essential Phonetics is a great book. It is very comprehensive and concise at the same time. It deals with pronunciation problems we always face in multicultural classes, and gives us teachers easy, straightforward phonetic input, enabling us to help our students.”

needs analysis and needs based learning

Differentiated Instruction

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We talk about the principle of differentiation in the TEFL Preparation Course and again in the Teaching English to Young Learners Course.  In both courses we consider how to apply it both in the adult classroom and with younger english language learners. Here are some books for further reading.

Detail of painting From the rooftop we Can See the City by Emma Louise Pratt

Using Image in Language Teaching

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This is a publication I’ve participated in, contributing one of the chapters. The book features articles and practical ideas for using still and moving images in language education.