This is the first FutureLearn course I’m taking, it’s been created by Central Queensland University. I want to understand how to encourage creative thinking in classes, particularly when with EAP students, children and teenagers as teaching creative thinking is becoming more of a feature in mainstream education.
RefuAid is a really positive non-profit organisation which helps asylum seekers in the UK to access education and training to further or adapt their skills to the UK context.
One common question asked throughout Adrian Underhill’s course was how could we adapt the activities for our more serious courses, the ones whose students tend to have very particular and definite aims in mind, such as Business English courses?
Today we finished Adrian Underhill’s two-week course, ‘Pronunciation, Performance and Poetry‘. Everyone had a poem they’d chosen and had been working on over the last week, crafting the stress, pauses and intonation. One student, Lauretta, made a poster, found a performance background image and compered the event. Everyone performed. It was a beautiful way to […]
When I started teaching the chart seemed practically incomprehensible to me. Even as I grew to understand it (and Adrian Underhill’s layout is the only one that seems to make sense) it felt like a great cognitive load to place on students (‘Think English spelling is hard? Now learn all these symbols!’). The DELTA, if […]
This phrase has come up a few times recently in different contexts and it’s one I’m interested in: a language teacher, you’d be forgiven for presuming, would tend to concentrate on the ‘outer’ voice.
This Is Just To Say By William Carlos Williams I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
On this course with Adrian Underhill we are preparing a poetry festival for the last class. Each day we start each session with a poem read by Adrian or another student. I confess when I first read this on the course description I was a little wary. I love poetry but was unsure about its […]
Two kinds of knowing: ‘Knowing’ as in a cognitive, intellectual knowledge. And ‘Knowing’ as in ‘knowing in your bones’, ‘lived experience’ perhaps, or realization. Adrian Underhill offers a neurological term: ‘proprioception’ to contrast with cognitive knowing in pronunciation. Proprioception is a perception and awareness of the position and movement of the body. This kind of […]
Pron is a physical activity, it makes sense to start by locating it physically. Adrian Underhill does this by taking the class on a ‘jungle walk’ – visualising the tongue as a leaf tumbling through a jungle in which the lips, teeth and palate represent trees etc.