If you are a busy English language teacher or trainer looking for support and development materials for your classroom, we can help you with this weekly collection of links to free materials from our British Council websites for teachers.
Cursos de desarrollo profesional para docentes y asesorías para las instituciones en Chile. Check our offer and contact us atenglish@britishcouncil.cl
Giffen is an unpleasant man who is always on the lookout for ways to trick money out of 'suckers' and his amazing glue seems to be the perfect way to do this. Until he come across Flinty, that is. Strap Box Flyer is from the pen of one of Australia's most popular writers for children, Paul Jennings.
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Effective in-service training (INSET) is vital for both teacher development and curriculum reform. This paper contains a number of practical guidelines on how to maximise the potential for 'best practice' in ELT INSET.
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This month, our featured blogger is Sandy Millin. We enjoyed her entry 'Motivation Stations', which deals with a situation many teachers will be familiar with: how to keep students on the 'intermediate plateau' motivated.
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The concept of multiculturality can nowadays be easily understood by our students because they have always lived in a multicultural world, where multicultural means a mere tolerance of other cultures. But should we go a step further? Is tolerating each other enough?
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As part of our project on the environment, my year sevens have various new words to learn. They vary from the words boil and plant, to recycle, laundry and earth. Not the most scintillating in the world and so today, in an attempt to liven things up, I told them to write a story using as many of the words as possible.
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Currently, I am moderating a free online course, Digital Storytelling for Young Learners (http://digitalstorytelling4kids.pbworks.com) Over 250 participants have joined and have shared incredibly imaginative stories in our online class portfolio. One of the most surprising discoveries, though, was that 62% of the teachers who took our survey said they had never had their learners create digital stories.
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As a language assistant you will probably have gone through (or you may still be going through) the British or Irish educational system so you will be able to tell your students about your experiences and give them first-hand information on how the UK educational system works.
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This is a game to make any gap-fill task or cloze texts (reading tasks with gaps) more exciting. You need an envelope full of small bits of paper. Chop up a few pages of scrap paper for this. Students compete against one another in pairs.
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Next week we will be celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens! In preparation for this we have been creating teaching materials based on Dickens texts. Over the next week, we will also be live-streaming an event from the UK on this site, with Jeremy Harmer and Steve Bingham.
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Originally developed for radio, this series of programmes and accompanying worksheets covers topics of teacher development such as lesson planning and working with large classes. You can listen to the programmes online and download the materials.
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This lesson is aimed at lower intermediate students. It could be adapted for use with higher and lower levels. This particular lesson uses an adapted version of ‘The Emperor's new clothes' by Hans Christian Andersen, but other stories can be used in the same way.
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Text use may seem a dull topic after all the exciting matters that other guest writers have dealt with recently. However, language learning is, after all, learning language, not just doing fun things with it. And texts – by which I mean the relatively short spoken and written passages that come in textbooks and other teaching materials – can, if they are used properly, play an important part in the learning process.
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TESOL ESP IS and IATEFL ESP SIG would like to invite ELT professionals from around the work to embark on a first joint online discussion titled English for Specific Purposes (ESP) around the world in academic and occupational contexts. In order to register and participate, please visit the TESOL Community site here.
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In my previous post I wrote about the journey of teachers becoming a group. Now it’s time for reflecting on ways of maintaining group dynamics in the class. In the initial group formation period as a teacher I try to establish a non-threatening sense of a class identity and a learning community.
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Have you ever felt you were asking all the questions about students’ opinions? Do you find you are doing more talking in a discussion than your class? Here are some tips to shift the task focus from you talking to them (they have to talk to each other) give them control of their own discussion.
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You may find in your primary English class that you have children who struggle with the school language in their first year of primary school because they have a different home language. How will this affect your classroom when teaching English to 1st year primary? How can you cater to their needs?
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To find more teaching articles and materials visit www.teachingenglish.org.uk and Language Assistant
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