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6th Visit to British Council Bilbao’s Teaching For Success Conference

Header image credit: https://www.britishcouncil.es/en/english-teacher-conference  Yesterday (Saturday 21st September'18) was my 6th year attending the British Council's annual conference, Teaching For Success, in Bilbao - an annual highlight in my calendar. As with previous years, there were many great moments and takeaways, including: meeting up with CELTA colleagues; Robin Walker's use of Sting's An English Man in New …

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Twist on a classic: Ranking

Today I discovered the Tesoltoolbox.com blog. It’s definitely a site that’s going to be well worth spending some time with.

This post that I’m rebloging is a great simple twist on classing ranking activities. Enjoy!

TESOL TOOLBOX

Not quite as ubiquitous as the past two classic activities (brainstorming and warmer questions), rank-ordering is nonetheless a TESOL mainstay. Here’s a nifty adaptation…

A classic

Rank-ordering activities generate lots of discussion. Presented on the board, on paper, as little cards, or even on screen, we often get learners to rank things from 1 to 10 in order of preference or importance, like:

  • Holiday destinations
  • Restaurants in the local area
  • Personal qualities in a best friend
  • Ingredients for success (see example here)
  • Goals for a language course (see First lessons with adults or teens)

Ranking is often chosen as a way to engage learners in a topic or personalise a lexical set. But beyond that, it’s a great for critical thinking.

The twist

A ‘priorities diamond’ is a simple graphic organiser that takes ranking to the next level. I’ve used it several times, even in training…

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Using news stories/newspapers in the classroom via https://eltexperiences.com/

An intersting blog post share from the ELTExperiences.com blog

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A year in Review 2017-2018

Image Credit: Tumisu on Pixabay.com

Before the new academic year starts up it's time to look back and carry out the (third) annual review of my practice and development as an English language teacher (previous yearly reviews can be found here: 2016-17 and 2015-16 ). With these reflective pieces I want to make myself look back at the previous academic …

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#ELT Project Ideas for teens

Nice article and some great ideas for the new school year from the FabEnglishIdeas.com blog

Fab English ideas

Write a letter – last year we wrote a letter to the queen, who replied. This year we wrote to Harry, who apparently has been to busy to answer. So next year, rather than write one letter from the whole class the students are going to write one each, or in pairs, then we should get at least a few answers.

Series Club – The plan is to choose a series during our first meeting and then fix a regular date to get together and watch an episode and discuss it in English. Friday lunch usually works well, and the main rule of course is NO SPOILERS!

Book Club – This was hard to get off the ground last time as not many students could read whole novels in English and we wanted to read YA fiction, not easy readers. So the solution we have come up with is…

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My take on ‘Expert Interviews’

After a little break away from updating my site, here is my version of the well documented 'expert interviews' speaking and discussion class which I did with some of my groups a few weeks ago. In a nutshell, first students hear and watch a story of mistaken identity which resulted in a difficult interview situation.  After this first stage and looking at some chunks of language,  each student is allocated a topic in which they are to be experts and answers questions from the other class members. 

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Halloween Reverse Taboo speaking activity

Image Credit: Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay.com A quick Halloween activity for the classroom aimed at intermediate and higher level  students with a focus on speaking fluency and revision of Halloween vocabulary. The idea for this activity came from a session I attended in September at the British Council's Annual Teachers' Conference in Bilbao.  Silvia Benítez and …

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Kahoot homework

Image credit: kahoot blog https://kahoot.com/blog/2017/09/14/

Just a quick resource share and update, the engaging classroom game Kahoot has recently introduced a single player mode, or homework mode as they are pushing it.  This now means that students can engage with the quizzes independently as a homework revision activity outside of the classroom on a single screen. 

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iDIOTS video – Extra speaking activity for Unit 3 laser B2

This is a short speaking activity based around the video 'iDoits' to get students talking about the effects of technology and consumerism on our lives

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Article – Reflective teaching: Exploring our own classroom practice | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC

An interesting article from the British Council about reflecting on teaching practice .