“AI won’t take your job. It’s somebody using AI that will take your job” Richard Baldwin, Economist. Whether or not AI will eventually make EFL teachers obsolete, our students are using more and more AI applications and we need to be able to respond to that, be aware of the pitfalls and the benefits, and […]
The Trinity Cert PT I’d never heard of a Cert PT before finding this course. It is the Trinity Certificate for Practising Teachers. It’s a level 6 qualification, which places it between the CELTA (level 5) and DELTA (level 7). As I understand it, it is possible to take a Cert PT in different specialisations […]
One of my favourite games to play with students of intermediate level and above is Idioms Pictionary. This is also a good game your family can play with homestay students. It’s a simple game – most people know the rules of Pictionary. It’s good practice in creating pictures to aid vocabulary learning. All you need […]
Courses These are short self-study courses, made up of three modules plus an introductory module which you only need do once. I’m not sure how much time they suggest for each course but a whole course can be completed in 2 – 3 hours. The courses I’ve taken are listed below. There are several other […]
List of blog posts on root words from Latin and Greek and their meanings. Some knowledge of root words and meanings can really help students when guessing the meaning of unfamiliar vocabulary in exam conditions. Some of these words are quite advanced but particularly useful for students studying English for Academic or Specific Purposes (particularly […]
I’ve been teaching IELTS for years but feel that a lot of my material has grown stale. Also I’m increasingly asked to take on IELTS students of lower levels, but most of my current materials cater to those aiming for a 6.5 and above. There are a lot of teaching IELTS courses out there currently. […]
Have a look at ‘Vocabulary Profiling 1‘ for reasons to profile vocabulary. LexTutor is a little less user-friendly than VocabKitchen (you may not want students to try it themselves) but offers some additional features. One of these gives you the Type-Token Ratio (TTR) of your text. This is the number of word types against the […]
How do you decide on the vocabulary to teach students? Which vocabulary in a given text would you want students to learn and which items could you just gloss? If you use a course book, you probably don’t really think about this but if you’re adapting resources (either authentic materials or changing the […]
Blog posts and examples of English Accents can be found here: English Accents and Dialects: Introduction English Accents Around the World English Accents Around the UK
Organisation Creating a Study Plan Vocabulary Notebooks