De-mystifying the Phonemic Chart

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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 anything, made it seem less accessible (unvoiced bilabial plosive, anyone?).

Adrian Underhill, though, strips all that away through use of gesture and mime, by focusing on the chart as a ‘geographical map’ of the mouth which helps locate the physical movements we make in production, using simple prepositions of place to describe movement. Read more

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The Inner Voice

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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. Read more

Performance: Humanizing the Classroom

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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 place in the classroom. It appeared to me perhaps as a bit of a throwback to those 70s EFL texts I was so obsessed with when I started out as an idealistic 19 year old – Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrim’s, NLP in the classroom etc. All these years on I guess I’ve become more cynical and jaded.

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The Life Game

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NOTE: This ‘game’ has grown organically over the years as various teachers have made observations & contributions (I don’t claim sole authorship).

The Life Game is my favourite ‘getting to know you’ type activity because it:

  • requires few resources
  • is easy to set up
  • is based on students’ real experiences
  • is actually interesting
  • is genuinely ‘bonding’ & establishes a nice class atmosphere
  • gives me a good idea of the students’ speaking level/ability to communicate
  • gives me a good idea of the students’ interests
  • with adjustments can be made to work with any level post beginner.
  • works well with one-to-one classes as well as larger groups.
  • can last anywhere from 20 minutes to 1 1/2 hours with pre & post activities.

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Teaching Teenagers

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I’ve recently been working with a non-native English speaking English teacher from Spain on a home stay English refresher course. She’s taught English to adults for many years in a language college but in September will be teaching High School students. Like most of us who’ve become comfortable with a certain age group, she’s feeling some trepidation. We had a lot of conversations about teaching teenagers.

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Map of British Empire

An English Empire? Linguistic Imperialism and me.

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800px-1855_Colton_Map_of_the_World_on_Mercator_Projection_-_Geographicus_-_WorldMercator-colton-1855When I completed my CELTA (the initial training course for EFL teachers) and considered all the places in the world I wanted to travel to and teach in, I faced some, half-joking, accusations that what I was about to do aided some covert imperialist agenda. Was I a modern-day missionary, an ELT evangelist preaching Received Pronunciation, sermonising about sentence structure, bearing witness to SVO word order? Was I an unwitting foot soldier in the building of a new English Empire, annihilating native languages, crushing cultures, promulgating Western capitalist ideals?

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