Support for Teaching ESP
English for specific purposes: Conversational feedback – effective error correction
Colin Barnett offers suggestions for effective error correction and language improvement in one-to-one classes.
English for specific purposes: Aspects of teaching English one-to-one
A discussion of the benefits of teaching one-to-one.
Support for Teaching ESOL
ESOL support: Questions and answers
Chris Speck gives tips and advice on how to teach ESOL adults to read and write.
ESOL support: Teaching tips
Chris Speck offers a heap of useful suggestions on how teachers can support ESOL students.
Business needs analysis: What is a needs analysis?
What is a needs analysis? Alex Case explains all, offering tips on how to design and conduct one for your business English students.
Introduction to Business Top Trumps
Yes, you can play card games in your business-English classroom! We all know that if students enjoy their English lessons and have fun while learning, they are more likely to retain what they have been taught.
Assessment matters: Designing your own tests
Adrian Tennant explores some of the issues behind designing your own tests and gives some practical examples of how to go about it.
Assessment matters: What is assessment?
Adrian Tennant takes a look at what is meant by assessment in this introductory article in the Assessment matters series.
The corpus principle: Introduction to corpora
In this six-part series, Jamie Keddie asks, 'What is a corpus?' and invites us to think about how we might use corpora in the classroom.
Your English: Idioms: horse
Get your new set of idioms straight from the horse’s mouth with Tim Bowen’s latest Your English.
Differences in American and British English grammar - article
An article by Kerry Maxwell and Lindsay Clandfield on recognizing grammatical differences between American and British English.
Comparative and superlative adjectives – article
An article by Kerry Maxwell and Lindsay Clandfield covering ways to approach teaching comparatives and superlatives.
Nouns and phrases
Our experts provide a compendium of tips and ideas for teaching nouns, prepositions and relative clauses in English.
Reading matters: What is reading?
This article takes a look at what we actually mean by reading and whether or not it can be taught or just practised.
Reading matters: Reading strategies
This article looks at a variety of different strategies and examines why, when and how you might use each of them to develop your students' reading skills.
Listening skills: Top Tips
Miles Craven offers some useful techniques to use when teaching listening.
Listening matters: Top-down and bottom-up listening
Adrian Tennant explores two concepts relating to how students process listening texts – 'top down' and 'bottom up' – and gives some practical ideas for the classroom.
Writing matters: Getting started
This article takes a look at getting started with writing practice and examines why students often find writing difficult.
Writing matters: Planning, drafting and editing
Writing is a process. Good writers plan what they will write, come up with ideas, draft, revise and edit. This article will give some practical ideas for how students can be taught to become good writers.
First Day: First lesson speaking activities
The following are five quick activities that can be used to encourage speaking in first classes of a course or school year.
Speaking matters: Pairwork
Adrian Tennant gives an introduction to using pairwork for teaching speaking skills.