General

  • Ideally, photo of a teacher with a coursebook. If too hard, photo of a teacher with books or photo of a teacher reading a book.
    Article

    General: teaching with coursebooks

    If your relationship with your coursebook is going a little stale, here are a baker’s dozen of ideas to inspire and provoke you.

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    General: Learners look at learning

    This month Jim Scrivener talks about how teachers can encourage their students to become more aware of the learning process.

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    General: Guided tours

    Wouldn’t it be nice to get out of the classroom sometimes? If your school permits it, and if your class is of a suitably manageable size, there are many interesting and useful things that you can do outside your normal room.

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    General: extension activities

    Ever run out of things to do five minutes before the end of class? An important lesson management skill is to make your material perfectly fit the lesson time.

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    General: controlling lesson time

    It can feel unsatisfactory to suddenly rush an activity at the end of a lesson. Here are some strategies for taking control of time and shortening over-long stages.

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    General: addressing the SP in ESP

    English for Specific Purposes (ESP) involves more than just working with texts and examples relevant to a particular professional area. Here are some ways of addressing those elusive SPs.

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    General: making things last

    Ever run out of things to do five minutes before the end of class? There are some fairly simple tricks for usefully extending an activity – so that things just beautifully fall into place.

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    General: the first lesson of the year

    Even if the teacher and class have all worked together before, it is still useful to have activities to welcome everyone back and mark the start of the new year.

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    General: holiday English courses

    Many teachers do summer work teaching on short intensive courses. Such courses often have more of a holiday atmosphere than normal classes and teachers may look for jollier, summery activities.

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    General: teaching English one-to-one

    Long one-to-one lessons can sometimes be exhausting for both teacher and learner. Here are some ideas for keeping them fresh.

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    General: teaching idioms and collocations

    Break away from predictable coursebook topics! How about basing a whole morning round a single word? These ideas would work for many items.

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    General: using translation

    There is a great deal of useful awareness-raising when learners compare English with their own tongue. Here are four great translation games - and they don’t even require you to speak the other language!

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    General: planning lessons

    Remember, a plan is not a route-map of what must happen in class, it is only your informed setting-up of some possibilities. Here are a few ideas for alternative plans:

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    General: setting homework

    Tired of setting the usual homework tasks? Here are 18 unusual ideas for "homedo" tasks.

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    General: are parrots back in fashion?

    Current methodology seems to pay far less attention to memorising and remembering activities than more traditional teaching approaches. Here are a few practical ideas for being creatively unfashionable.

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    General: pairing and grouping students

    With current teaching methodology teachers are constantly needing to get students into pairs or small groups. A bit of variety can sometimes raise a smile and can also help you to mix up groupings a little.