During a peak period when my teaching hours went up to 37.5 hours a week, I have to admit that the time I spent planning went down accordingly. I just didn’t have the time. But, I didn’t want to deliver sub-standard lessons and I still wanted them to be relevant and using authentic texts. So I developed … Continue reading A quick guide to exploiting articles.
So here is another activity that can be used more as revision, or even to test knowledge of a grammar point, to see if it needs teaching. It is something I tried out a couple of weeks ago and my class responded really well to it. Since then, there has been a noticeable improvement in … Continue reading Using Articles for Articles
This lesson basically came about when I recommended that all of my students read newspapers on a regular basis. The obvious reasons being, I wanted to widen their vocabulary, improve their reading skills and increase their cultural knowledge. It seemed so simple at the time. After a week I asked them how they were getting … Continue reading Reading skills – Newspaper articles
In 2019, I remember going to a talk by Peter Watkins and one thing he said really stuck with me. I’m paraphrasing but it was essentially that what students needed in the early days of (and indeed throughout) the language learning process was lots and lots of comprehensible input. At the time it really struck … Continue reading Textploitation for students has arrived
It’s a crazy time right now but out of the madness there are lessons to be learnt. We’ve already written about some lessons we learnt for creating and setting up effective post-lesson tasks but what have we learnt about the pre? Well, in the many blogs and articles on online teaching, I’ve read since Covid … Continue reading Pre-lesson Tasks: the great equaliser
We feel strongly that one of our jobs as teachers is to encourage discussion. For this reason, each year we write a lesson for international women’s day (9th March) in an effort to increase discussion on this topic specifically. You can find our previous lessons here, here and even here. Or, you could try our … Continue reading Invisible Women: Independent Research Skills
So, this lesson was a challenge. Literally, ‘Teaching Cat’ challenged us to make a lesson from this text so here we are. The original text is one of those fun quirky texts aimed at people in the past that is now ridiculous, you know the type. So far, so not very promising. Except, how many … Continue reading Manners, language and the importance of keeping with the times.
So you’ve got a text and it’s ridiculously interesting but it’s just that little bit too difficult for your students… If you’ve ever been in that situation, you might want to try rewordify. A colleague of mine put me onto this website a few years ago and I thought it was time to pass it … Continue reading Rewordify: website for simplifying a text
So this one is not a lesson as such but more an idea for your lessons. Coursebooks are rich resources for texts and sadly, due to completely understandable constraints (space / industry traditions / overall themes of a book / editor pressure) they are very often under-used. Listening exercises tend to test comprehension or act … Continue reading (T)ex(t)ploiting a coursebook listening text
Continuing the theme of IELTS lessons, this is another that looks to help students with their exam but also their university studies after. This looks to explore what arguments are being made and then asks students to respond to them. Stance and criticality are key elements of university study. The ability to understand a writer’s … Continue reading Responding to a Reading – Critical Reading
textploitation 