I periodically post “most popular” lists of websites (and books) that I think educators might find useful. Of course, there are a number of ways to gauge “popularity.” I just view these lists as opportunities to check-out some new sites, and… - 3 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 9:43pm -
There are tons of ways to use photos in lessons with English Language Learners (see The Best Ways To Use Photos In Lessons) and the Awkward Family Photos site is a great source for them. Some are inappropriate for classroom … Continue reading → - 4 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 9:24pm -
Blank On Blank is a PBS feature that creates excellent, short animated interviews with well-known figures. You can see all of them at their YouTube Channel. Here’s an interview with Tupac Shakur they just posted today: You might also be … Continu… - 12 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 12:49pm -
Here are some excellent additions to The Best Posts & Articles On 2012 PISA Test Results I posted this morning just after they came out: NASSP Statement on PISA Results: Despite Fervor Over Scores, US Continues to Ignore Lessons My … Continue readi… - 13 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 11:50am -
Sorry, I couldn’t resist adding this photo The Internet is awash with articles about this morning’s release of the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, test results. I’m just quickly posting the best resources I’ve s… - 1 day ago, 3 Dec 13, 10:00pm -
19 Mind-Blowing Tricks Every iPhone And iPad User Should Know is a post from BuzzFeed that has a lot of helpful advice to iPhone and iPad users. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Beginning iPad Users. - 1 day ago, 3 Dec 13, 2:29pm -
Time for another annual”The Best…” list…. This covers new games since I posted The Best Online Learning Games Of 2013 — So Far six months ago. As usual, In order to make it on this list, games had to: * … Continue reading → - 1 day ago, 3 Dec 13, 2:18pm -
Though the United States has declared January 11th to be Human Trafficking Awareness Day, the United Nations has chosen December 2nd to be International Day for the Abolition of Slavery. So here are two new additions to The Best Resources … Continu… - 2 days ago, 3 Dec 13, 11:16am -
Google Books can be a good research tool for students if they are aware of it and know how to use it. In the video below I provide a short overview of how to use Google Books for research. You can also find screenshots of the process here. This post… - 5 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 8:30pm -
A couple of years ago Microsoft launched an open source timeline tool called ChronoZoom. At that time ChronoZoom was an impressive interactive timeline of the history of the world. But that's all it was. Recently, I learned that ChronoZoom now allows… - 21 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 4:09am -
Yesterday, I shared a nice collection of personal finance lesson activities called Money As You Grow. Reviewing Money As You Grow prompted me to pull up some of my other resources for personal finance lessons. Here are five of my favorite personal fi… - 23 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 2:10am -
One of the elements that is common to almost every video recorded on a mobile device is "throw away" footage at the beginning and end of every video. "Throw away" footage is the five seconds of giggling, shaky shots of the ground, and other nonsense… - 24 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 1:26am -
Over the weekend I shared the tip of holding your phone or tablet in landscape mode in order to shoot better videos and reduce your editing time. Yesterday, WeVideo released a short video with three more tips for recording better videos with your mob… - 1 day ago, 3 Dec 13, 11:11pm -
The White House is hosting a film festival for K-12 students in the United States. The White House is seeking student-produced videos about how students are currently using technology in school and how students might use technology in school in the f… - 1 day ago, 3 Dec 13, 10:59pm -
Pearltrees is a service that combines social bookmarking with mind-mapping. Using Pearltrees you can bookmark websites and arrange your bookmarks into webs or mindmaps of related topics. Recently, Pearltrees added the option for users to upload files… - 2 days ago, 3 Dec 13, 9:54am -
Last month I shared a handful of fun geography games as part of my list of resources for Geography Awareness Week. Where is...? is another good game to add to that list. This game uses a common concept for geography games; the name of a city is prese… - 2 days ago, 3 Dec 13, 1:29am -
In a Tweet over the weekend I mentioned that the Buck Institute for Education offers good project based learning activities. Most of what BIE offers is not free. There is some good free content on BIE. The most notable of that free content being thei… - 2 days ago, 3 Dec 13, 1:01am -
The rule of thumb to use when telling others what someone else has said is to take one step back into the past. For example,Tom, Your Friend: I'll help you with your homework.Reporting: Tom told me he would help me with my homework.Learn the rule… - 2 days ago, 2 Dec 13, 9:11pm -
A number of English teachers have been kind enough to share some top notch pronunciation lessons for use in class. Here's a selection of a few:Improving Business Communication SkillsIntonation Practice - Rise and FallP/F and R/L Sounds for Korean L… - 5 days ago, 29 Nov 13, 9:19pm -
This holiday feature includes a Thanksgiving reading comprehension with difficult vocabulary explanations about the history of the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving followed by a Thanksgiving reading comprehension quiz. - 9 days ago, 25 Nov 13, 6:43pm -
Double check is an idiom used when we want to confirm information. You can double check facts and figures, or simply the address of a friend. For simple questions between friends we can use a simple 'right?'. However, forms such as question tags an… - 12 days ago, 22 Nov 13, 5:42pm -
The choice between 'when' and 'while' with the past continuous tense can be confusing. In the case of the title, "while I was studying" is the correct choice as we use 'while' to express the action which was interrupted.While I was studying, my fri… - 14 days ago, 20 Nov 13, 8:38pm -
What are friends for? Well, for one thing, friends encourage each other. Encouraging others help us communicate, help and give advice.Encouragement is very similar to expressing enthusiasm for what others do, or for the things we enjoy the most i… - 16 days ago, 18 Nov 13, 8:45pm -
A hamburger essay probably won't help you if you're hungry, but understanding how a hamburger relates to essay structure will help you with essay writing skills. You can also follow the four step lesson to writing an essay to learn the ropes. Final… - 20 days ago, 14 Nov 13, 10:32pm -
The choice between gerund (doing) or infinitive (to do) when following another verb is important. It's hard to get an exhaustive list, but this gerund or infinitive verb list provides approximately 100 verb combinations with definitions for each verb… - 22 days ago, 12 Nov 13, 10:48pm -
If you are like me, you probably enjoy traveling and taking vacations. Now that the academic year is in full swing most of us can only dream about future vacations. To help you think up new ideas, here is a vacation gap fill quiz with all sorts of… - 23 days ago, 11 Nov 13, 8:32pm -
Two hundred years since the publication of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s most famous novel, readers continue to be entertained and illuminated by… - 28 Jan 13, 7:19pm -
In this lesson students will gain an overview of what climate change is. They will read some short texts, exchange information and make notes. They will… - 24 May 11, 7:42pm -
Asking questions is a natural feature of communication, but also one of the most important tools which teachers have at their disposal. Questioning is cr… - 3 Feb 10, 9:48pm -
Here’s only the second guest post on this particular blog. This time, it’s a post by a wonderful teacher I’ve been lucky enough to meet via the MA TESOL I work on at University of Westminster. Mumtaz Ayub has been teaching for the past 13 yea… - 8 days ago, 27 Nov 13, 1:20am -
In 2008, a devastating earthquake measuring around 8 on the Richter scale hit the Chinese province of Sichuan, killing over 70,000 people. Despite their initially sterling work in responding swiftly to the disaster, the government soon started to com… - 28 days ago, 6 Nov 13, 11:45pm -
In the two previous posts in this little mini-series, I have talked firstly about how I might tackle any given piece of vocabulary-based / lexical self-study material that you bring into class in terms of what I’d do, say, ask and write whilst chec… - 28 days ago, 6 Nov 13, 8:40pm -
In the first part of this post, I explored some of the things that you can do as teacher – both in terms of preparation / planning and in terms of actual classroom practice – to help to take lexical self-study material off the page and to bring i… - 40 days ago, 26 Oct 13, 4:41am -
This post is essentially a response to a request by one the blog’s readers, Patrick Gallagher, who emailed me recently and asked for ideas on using material that’s essentially written for self-study in the classroom. Now, initially I was struck b… - 41 days ago, 24 Oct 13, 10:22pm -
It’s been way too long since I managed to post anything here. The last few weeks have come and gone in a bit of a blur: new writing projects, a new term at work, a plenary at the wonderful Poland IATEFL conference and so on. Anyway, yesterday my co… - 54 days ago, 12 Oct 13, 6:04am -
Pronunciation is quite possibly the most neglected area of language teaching. In many of the classes I’ve observed over the years, I’ve seen little or no attempt to work on pronunciation and where it IS focused on it’s often instinctive attempt… - 20 Jul 13, 5:06am -
This post follows on from the one I bashed out last week considering the influence of advertising on speech, and the way in which this can sometimes make life hard for even the most fluent of non-natives. It also follows on from conversations and tho… - 6 Jul 13, 9:09pm -
I’ve outlined my (many!) thoughts about the relationship – or lack thereof – between language and culture several times on this very blog, as many of you will already know. What may be less well known is that some time ago, over on a site run b… - 2 Jul 13, 6:05am -
As promised, blogging resumes shortly… but in a new site and with a new format. You can find the new blog here: it’s called The (De-) Fossilization Diaries, and charts the attempts I’m making to improve my faltering Spanish. Hope to see you the… - 23 Aug 13, 5:31pm -
So this is it, folks: I’m closing down the blog for the summer… and for good. After 3 years, 150 posts, nearly 7000 comments, and innumerable hits, visits, views, however you want to describe and count them, plus one e-book spin-off (but no sign… - 9 Jun 13, 3:00pm -
A teacher educator in Norway reports on how she has used ideas from my book How to Teach Vocabulary (2002) on an in-service course for local primary and lower secondary school teachers. Mona Flognfeldt writes: ‘I have shared with my students a lot… - 2 Jun 13, 3:00pm -
A couple of weeks ago the University of Barcelona hosted a week-long course on Gesture and SLA, run by Dr Marianne Gullberg, Professor of Psycholinguistics at Lund University in Sweden. Marianne has to be one of the leading experts on gesture and lan… - 26 May 13, 3:00pm -
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendos, The blackbird whistling Or just after. Wallace Stevens, ‘Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird’. It’s spring and the male blackbirds are in full throat. I wa… - 19 May 13, 3:00pm -
A recent ELT Chat on using corpora suggested that what might be helpful for teachers coming to online corpora (such as COCA- the Corpus of Contemporary American English) for the first time would be some kind of screencast, demonstrating some of the m… - 12 May 13, 3:00pm -
What you do need to know in order to be able to teach? The question concerns not only teachers, but also teacher educators and methodology writers, since the way we answer it impacts on the design of training programs and their related materials. Do… - 5 May 13, 3:00pm -
This was written by a young American woman, visiting Europe for the first time, and speaking the German she had learned at school. It describes an experience many second language speakers will attest to: the turning point – that moment when suddenl… - 28 Apr 13, 3:00pm -
Three excellent presentations at IATEFL this year, each of which referenced Dogme, got me wondering. The first, Conversation-driven or dialogic methodology? ELT Classroom talk, was given by Dr Phil Chappell, from Macquarie University in NSW. Phil sta… - 21 Apr 13, 3:00pm -
Michael Man, an Online Platforms Trainer at Oxford University Press, shows you how to use messaging, discussions and chats effectively with the new Online Practice and Online Workbooks. You can take part in his webinar ‘Messages, Discussions and C… - 16 days ago, 18 Nov 13, 8:56pm -
When John and I started writing Headway we had certain beliefs about ELT borne out of our experience as teachers and teacher trainers. And, like many teachers, we weren’t always entirely happy with the courses we used. However, we decided … Conti… - 20 days ago, 14 Nov 13, 5:30pm -
Today’s question for the Q: Skills for Success authors: How can I get my students to use smart devices in the classroom? Joe McVeigh responds. Do you have a question about teaching English to adults that you’d like to ask … Continue reading → - 21 days ago, 13 Nov 13, 11:41pm -
Sean Dowling, an Educational Technology Coordinator, looks at how teachers can add value to the student writing process by using blog posts in writing tasks. There is no doubt that writing to a wider audience motivates the writer and results … Cont… - 23 days ago, 11 Nov 13, 11:24pm -
We’re helping to solve your EFL teaching problems by answering your questions every two weeks. In this week’s blog, Stacey Hughes responds to Klaudija Pralija’s Facebook post. Kaludija’s problem is not only getting students to write more than… - 28 days ago, 7 Nov 13, 1:42am -
Be careful! The swine flu will kill millions of people, ruin the economy, and create chaos around the world! When there was an outbreak, schools closed. In Egypt, the health minister ordered all of the pigs slaughtered. Face masks became a booming bu… - 4 days ago, 1 Dec 13, 12:36pm -
Some people love shopping. These people buy on impulse, which means they don't think about the cost or the need. Some of these people have huge amounts of credit card debt as a result. If this sounds like you, then you may be a shopaholic.A recent t… - 16 days ago, 19 Nov 13, 10:37am -
It's very difficult to quit smoking. Anyone who has tried to quit understands the challenges it took to succeed. There is a lot of advice about how to quit smoking, from nicotine gum and nicotine patches to counseling sessions and hypnotherapy. Only… - 29 days ago, 6 Nov 13, 11:36am -
Obesity causes heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. In fact, the American Institute for Cancer Research believes that obesity causes more than 100,000 cases of cancer each year in the US. This statement is supported by the annual number of cancer cas… - 41 days ago, 25 Oct 13, 12:20pm -
According to a World Bank report, children need to eat enough good food, as well as the right kind of food. If children don't get enough vitamins and minerals, then they have long-term problems. At two years of age, for example, the children are unde… - 43 days ago, 23 Oct 13, 10:42am -
About seventy countries around the world use daylight savings time. Each spring, clocks get moved forward one hour because the daytime hours are longer in the summer. Each fall, clocks get moved back one hour because the daytime hours are shorter in… - 45 days ago, 21 Oct 13, 11:37am -
New Entry: 'Kat Slater' has just been added to the Cockney Rhyming Slang area of UsingEnglish.com. This entry is only available in our members' area. - 2 days ago, 2 Dec 13, 3:20pm -
New Entry: 'IELTS Academic Exam Overview- Comparing and Contrasting Phrases Practice' has just been added to the Lesson Plans area of UsingEnglish.com. - 5 days ago, 29 Nov 13, 11:20pm -
New Entry: 'GFN' has just been added to the Chatlish area of UsingEnglish.com. This entry is only available in our members' area. - 6 days ago, 28 Nov 13, 11:20pm -
Today’s guest post comes from Jeffery Nelson, the creator of a great new blog called Living Bilingual. After you enjoy the article stop by and visit. ———- Language skills are hard to measure. There is an innate subjectivity in analyzing a l… - 13 Aug 13, 12:27pm -
Today I am excited to share another great guest post from a regular EDLL reader, Arabic expert and language lover Saqib Hussain. You can find out more about Saqib and about Arabic at Arabic Studio. For now, enjoy the post! ————- OK, so… - 26 Jul 13, 5:06am -
I have been an admirer of Jana Fadness for a number of years now and so was excited to be able to interview her a few weeks back. Her blog, Adventures of the Directionally Challenged shares here experiences as a language learner, a traveler and a t… - 4 Jul 13, 5:11am -
Perhaps you are familiar with Tim Ferris’ “4 Hour” series of books. In today’s guest post, Allan Ngo of Money in Mandrin unpacks a few lessons he took away from The 4 Hour Chef. Enjoy! RIIIIIIIIIIIIING!!!!!!!! Your alarm clock blares! POW… - 24 Jun 13, 11:16pm -
Today’s guest post is from Noel van Vliet, the writer behind SmartLanguageLearner.com. It was certainly a timely post for me as I’ve been struggling amidst part time jobs and being back in the states to stay connected with learning Turkish an… - 10 Jun 13, 8:20pm -
It’s not everyday that I get a postcard with a picture of an elephant trying to get on a double decker bus, but when I do, I like to share about it. The picture itself is so great – an apt metaphor for life as we know it. Much of what we do is fi… - 31 May 13, 5:11am -
Part of my work, at my school, is to create a framework for our Middle School that will take (already) blogging students from Elementary School and prepare a smooth transition for them, as they move on to High School. I am looking BEYOND the one clas… - 8 days ago, 27 Nov 13, 8:01am -
As I am speaking of the benefits of blogging as a professional and student, I sometimes wonder if the word “blogging” is not a word we speak as we talk at cross-purposes with other educators. When I use the word “blogging”, I am NOT seeing :… - 11 days ago, 24 Nov 13, 4:34am -
Our school‘s fabulous PE teacher, Claire Arcenas, is bringing blogging to her PE classes. She is incorporating Visual Thinking Routines to help her students become reflective commenters. In a recent planning session, she reminded me of the book Mak… - 12 days ago, 23 Nov 13, 9:29am -
Another mind shift that is taking place around us and that we need to be aware of in education: the MIDDLE MAN is gone! The middle man between me and: a global audience information an author an expert eye witnesses and current events the customer ser… - 13 days ago, 22 Nov 13, 4:19am -
In Part 1 of Literature Circle Discussions, I shared 6th Grade Humanities teacher, Emily Vallillo‘s well structured and organized Literature Circle lesson. In Part 2, I shared the upgrade of traditional lit circles to a new learnflow which included… - 14 days ago, 21 Nov 13, 9:21am -
Professional Learning Board just released a Self-study iPads in the Classroom course I wrote. It is a self-directed course to take in your own time and at your own speed. “You have an iPad in your classroom, now what?” The iPad helps us prepa… - 22 days ago, 13 Nov 13, 6:34am -
Over the years, spending time with thousands of new or budding teachers – I’ve thought and thought and thought about the major factors that make a “great teacher”. It’s not an easy thing to pin down, given that there are so many differen… - 54 days ago, 11 Oct 13, 9:26pm -
I’ve been working on a new post this weekend, a reflection on my own development as a teacher and all the footprints that truly led me to where I am right now. Something for myself but which other teachers might find some truth therein. I’m not e… - 61 days ago, 5 Oct 13, 6:51am -
This story comes from my time teaching at Bloor and Bay, 5th floor, N.E tower – Language Connections International. I was teaching new immigrants to Canada part of the day, foreign students the other half. Small classrooms with one wall all windows… - 74 days ago, 22 Sep 13, 5:06am -
One conclusion I’ve come to after years teaching – testing and assessment are poorly used as a way for students to learn. This is curious and unfortunate because students for the most part DO get motivated and energized through tests and quizzes.… - 84 days ago, 12 Sep 13, 4:23am -
Today, went out for a nice bike ride with “my old man”. He’s almost 70 and he kicked my butt! Truly. I’ll admit I’m not in great shape anymore but watching my dad, “power in” the last 20 k of our ride, me lagging behind – gave me paus… - 88 days ago, 7 Sep 13, 7:49pm -
Al Filreis's Modern and Contemporary American Poetry is one of the most successful MOOCs. In particular, participants' involvement is sustained over time to an unusual extent — here's the daily volume of forum posts and comments for the first two m… - 3 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 10:26pm -
When the delightfully cute UK Olympic diving star Tom Daley decided to come out as bisexual, he made a statement with a charmingly clever use of singular they: "In spring this year my life changed massively when I met someone, and they make me feel s… - 5 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 8:26pm -
On September 25, I posted on "Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia", which occasioned a vigorous debate. A few of the commenters thought the essay in question wasn't actually written by a student. Be that as it may, this habit of replacin… - 1 day ago, 3 Dec 13, 4:28pm -
[Warning: More than usually geeky...] During the past decade or two, there's been a growing body of work arguing for a special connection between endogenous brain rhythms and timing patterns in speech. Thus Anne-Lise Giraud & David Poeppel, "Cortical… - 2 days ago, 2 Dec 13, 10:59pm -
Andrew Gelman, "Separated by a common blah blah blah", SMCISS 12/1/2013: I love reading the kind of English that English people write. It’s the same language as American but just slightly different. I was thinking about this recently after coming a… - 3 days ago, 2 Dec 13, 6:57am -
Below is a photo that Bryan Van Norden took of a baseball cap a guy was wearing at a casino in Atlantic City. Someone else at the table asked him what it meant, and he said he thought it was Chinese for "good luck." Bryan explained that he was wrong.… - 4 days ago, 1 Dec 13, 11:30am -
Someone (let’s call him Marc Prensky!) once came up with a rather neat description of the difference between some kids and some older people. The former, he suggested, were digital natives who grew up with technology all around them as a given –… - 12 days ago, 23 Nov 13, 4:01am -
As October faded into November I found myself giving talks at the fabulous TELLSI conference in Mashad, Iran, immediately followed by a stint at the IGA conference (Instituto Guatamalteco-Americano) in Guatemala City, and then MEXTESOL in Queretero,… - 16 days ago, 19 Nov 13, 1:44am -
I wonder if you have seen the Roman Polanksi movie The Ghostwriter, or read the novel The Ghost by Robert Harris that it is based on. The premise of the film and novel is that the central character is hired to ‘ghost’ the autobiography of a past… - 66 days ago, 30 Sep 13, 6:01am -
Something big is happening in the small country of Uruguay (with a population of approximately 3.5 million, it comes in at number 134 in comparison with other countries – remember, China has 1.3 billion inhabitants!) But Uruguay has always ‘punch… - 23 Aug 13, 9:27pm -
Some time back I wrote a post about whether music practice tells us anything about practising language. I enjoyed thinking about it, and especially interviewing musicians to get their take on what was/is going on. There seemed to be a consensus that… - 6 Jul 13, 5:37am -
One of the most interesting sessions I attended at the recent IATEFL conference was by a Chinese trainer called Jun Zheng. Unfortunately her session was not filmed and so is not online (but there are many other fabulous presentations and interviews a… - 22 Apr 13, 10:58pm -
A summary of the TESOL France’s 32nd annual colloquium which took place in Paris between 22 and 24 November 2013.ELT conferences often have a title or theme with various presentations loosely related to it. TESOL France’s annual colloquium he… - 3 days ago, 2 Dec 13, 4:14am -
This is a somewhat belated reaction to Catherine Walter's article which appeared in the Learning English section of Guardian last autumn. Click here to read it.Language or maths?Spaarnestad Photo via Nationaal ArchiefDr Catherine Walter’s article… - 35 days ago, 30 Oct 13, 6:45pm -
Image source:www.willis-elt.co.ukI opened my Facebook yesterday morning and was saddened to see Chia Suan Chong’s post about the passing of Dave Willis. I went over to Twitter and the feed was already filled with RIPs and condolences. For most in… - 38 days ago, 28 Oct 13, 9:31am -
By jjpacres via Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]I often cite research in my talks so in this series of posts I would like to share some interesting studies which looked at how second language (L2) learners use collocations. This post reviews three studies … - 52 days ago, 13 Oct 13, 4:03pm -
By @eannegrenoble | eltpics on FlickrIn the middle of the market where I go for my weekly vegetable shopping there is a stall where I buy olives. The owners of the stall are a husband and wife team who know I am an English teacher. The other day th… - 61 days ago, 4 Oct 13, 5:55pm -
Photo by @GoldsteinBen via eltpics on FlickrA second lesson with two new pre-intermediate (A2) students (I usually put my private students in pairs). In the first lesson we read three stories about immigrants (from Innovations Pre-Intermediate) and… - 81 days ago, 15 Sep 13, 3:38am -
140 character bio:Dr. Shaunie Shammass is VP Linguistic Innovation at SpeakingPal with expertise in automatic speech recognition, e-learning and pedagogy.1. What do you do?Hi. I’m SpeakingPal’s VP – Linguistic Innovation. I create all of… - 8 hours ago, 4 Dec 13, 5:30pm -
Some fundamental aspects of games should not be forgotten when an ‘educational game’ is designed, such as finding a balance between giving the player a sense of progress and the feeling of being challenged. - 1 day ago, 3 Dec 13, 5:30pm -
At eltjam, we've mentioned EdTech accelerators a few times recently. But what exactly are they, and how do they work? If you've got a great EdTech business idea, how could an accelerator help? Stephen Parkes of Go Enrol is immersed in the EdTech… - 2 days ago, 2 Dec 13, 5:42pm -
Way back in June we wrote about GlassLab’s partnership with Pearson and Electronic Arts and their collective efforts to develop a game-based learning product out of SimCity.Well, GlassLab launched the first edition of this hugely anticipated super… - 6 days ago, 29 Nov 13, 12:40am -
Dr Shaunie Shammass, VP Linguistic Innovation at SpeakingPal, talks to us about her work in bringing speech recognition tech up to speed with the needs of English language learners. - 7 days ago, 27 Nov 13, 10:24pm -
“All professions are conspiracies against the laity” (George Bernard Shaw in the play The Doctor’s Dilemma) Historically more commonly (documented) ... Continue reading - 10 days ago, 25 Nov 13, 12:45am -
Let’s start this by saying I don’t agree with the distinction people make sometimes between teacher training, teacher development, and ... Continue reading - 89 days ago, 7 Sep 13, 1:40am -
Talk given as part of the British Council Seminars (London, 31 April, 2013). source of recordings and an abstract can ... Continue reading - 14 Jul 13, 4:00pm -
While everyone seems comfortable in the lock-step chain of activities so far presented in the lesson, the student with arms ... Continue reading - 5 Jun 13, 3:03am -
Here’s a very short series about methodology. So short it has only one part. Since it’s impossible to determine one ... Continue reading - 13 May 13, 1:10am -
I am still on a high after one of the most enlightening weekends of Professional and Personal Development I have ever experienced. The 4th Reform Symposium Econference was a very exciting event!! A full list of all the session descriptions can be fou… - 47 days ago, 18 Oct 13, 10:42pm -
I am delighted to be presenting at the global and internationally renowned RSCON4 virtual e-conference. This action-packed event is going to be held online from Friday October 11 - Sunday October 13th.I have had the pleasure of presenting for The R… - 77 days ago, 18 Sep 13, 10:34pm -
The Lake School of English has recently been awarded 14 points of strength out of a total of 15, credited by the British Council. It continues to be a Centre of Excellence in 2013. You can read all about it, and view the full British Council Inspec… - 86 days ago, 9 Sep 13, 10:32pm -
Knowthenet presents Manners Matter the online Netiquette Do's and Don'ts infographic.Comment This is a really useful infographic with lots of insightful points to bear in mind. Thanks to knowthenet for allowing it to be reproduced in whole. I origin… - 22 Aug 13, 6:43pm -
I am absolutely delighted to announce the recent publication of a printed book called Connecting Online for Instruction and Learning: International Perspectives. I am one of the 14 co-authors who collaborated on this book over a period of time from… - 2 Jun 13, 7:58pm -
A link to my Slideshare presentation below. I do hope you enjoy it. The process of creating each new slide was very therapeutic. A link to all the resources I shared, located in a special wiki page I created called VRT 2013 Resources.I forgot… - 20 May 13, 4:08pm -
Usually when (it) is so simple we say, “Oh, I know that! It is quite simple. everyone knows that.”But if we do not find its value, it means nothing. It is the same as not knowing. - Shunryu Suzuki in “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” - I am not s… - 56 days ago, 9 Oct 13, 6:22pm -
Movement is the destruction of balance. I don’t know who I originally heard this from, but it was in the context of running theory. The idea is that in order for a physical body to move in any direction, it cannot be in a position of balance. That… - 22 Jul 13, 2:34am -
A 20-minute exploration of how conventional treatment of the”rules” for using the passive voice (as, for example, presented in coursebooks or standard student grammar books) misses the chance to introduce learners to a simpler, more elegant and m… - 17 Jun 13, 5:00am -
A couple of days ago I taught a short (35 minute) lesson to the teaching practice students on the CELTA course we are running in Hamburg at the moment. I had used a personal story to introduce the structure “used to” and, while setting up some… - 14 Jun 13, 3:50am -
Q: When is a train carriage not a train carriage? A: When it is a classroom. This is the substance of a conversation I heard on the train recently. Initially I only vaguely listened while trying to concentrate on my book, but the conversation began t… - 11 Jun 13, 3:33am -
