Teaching Skills Lessons

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Skills: assessing speaking skills

Teachers are often asked to evaluate learner progress during courses, maybe by preparing progress tests. Teachers often feel unsure as to the best way to do this. Here are some ideas.

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A third way

Hester Lott gives us some useful tips and suggestions for how to teach grammar.

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From paragraph to poem

Steve Buckledee employs a poetic strategy for getting students to examine language in greater detail.

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Awareness, appropriation and autonomy

In this article from the archives of English Teaching professional magazine, Scott Thornbury says that learning how to speak is as important as learning what to say.

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Natural language learning

Julie Moore discusses what learners' dictionaries can do for learners. The following article is reproduced with the kind permission of English Teaching professional .

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Teaching by numbers

Michael Rundell shows that word-frequency data is relevant to teaching and learning languages.

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Idiomaticity

Luke Prodromou wonders whether it still rains cats and dogs.

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Pronunciation - what are the limits?

An article discussing the problems faced when teaching English pronunciation.

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Teaching writing: the forgotten skill

Advice and suggestions about teaching writing in the English classroom.

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Teaching writing using the internet

Advice and suggestions about teaching writing using the internet

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Students who don't want to write

An article discussing ways to overcome the problem of students who don't want to write.

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Skills: whole-class discussions in English

Have you ever tried a whole-class discussion and, instead of speaking to each other, the learners direct all comments to you? How can you get more student-student interaction in such activities?

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Skills: bringing dialogues alive

You can find short dialogues in many course books. How can you exploit these scripts and get them to come alive?

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Skills: responding to real-life events

When there is a tragic event in the world teachers often feel the need to address it in some way in classroom time. Finding a way to do this appropriately and sensitively can sometimes be hard. Help is here.

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Skills: teaching English intonation

Many teachers find intonation difficult to teach. As a result they may avoid it. But intonation can be fun to work with - and it can make other language areas such as grammar easier to teach. Here are some ideas.

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Skills: teaching listening in English

Modern coursebooks provide some excellent recorded material, but it can be exciting to supplement this with more unusual sources of listening work. Here are some ideas.

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Skills: teaching English using anecdotes

Learners are often keen to hear stories about the teacher's life (even if they are not 100% true!). Here are some ideas for creating richer, more varied personal anecdotes.

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Skills: teaching resources: sound effects

Sound-effect CDs are an exciting teaching resource. These are recordings that have hardly any words on - but instead contain a sequence of noises such as crashes, bumps, bangs, whistles, screams etc. Here are some ideas for using sound-effects in the classroom.

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Skills: telephoning in English

For many learners using the telephone in English is a particularly nerve-wracking experience. As well as all the standard "telephone phrases" learners need strategies for getting a failing interaction to work. Here are some ideas for confidence-building in class.

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Skills: under the spell of spelling

English spelling? “Wonderful! I love it!” If that isn’t your students’ reaction, you might like to try some of these ideas.