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Grammar

Teachers and Grammar

“Over the years, language teachers have alternated between favoring teaching approaches that focus primarily on language use and those that focus on language forms or analysis. The alternation has been due to a fundamental disagreement concerning whether one learns to communicate in a second language by communicating in that language (such as in an immersion...Read More

Revisiting ELT Mantras #8: 4 types of phrasal verbs

As a Native English-Speaking Teacher (NEST) who didn’t learn any English grammar at school, it wasn’t until I started training as a teacher and then teaching that I really started to get to grips with the English grammatical – and later lexical – system. In fact, I don’t think there’s ever been a point where...Read More

We need to talk about English

I’ve recently come across Deena Boraie’s  2013 post on the TESOL webpage in which she lists the latest trends in EFL. Two of these trends immediately caught my eye: Change in the Goal of Teaching English: Our goals are no longer to transform our students into imitations of native speakers, but into “competent English-knowing bilinguals,”...Read More

The hazy line between lexis and grammar

This post is a short account of two lessons I taught in 2002 which helped me to make sense of something I’d read about in the late 90s, but couldn’t get my head around. Not until then anyway. If you’ve been following me for some time, you know that I’m a big believer in experiential...Read More

Ice-breakers, Warmers and Fillers

Some teachers see warmers, ice-breakers and fillers as basically different ways to say the same thing. In fact, they are quite different. While ice-breakers are usually meant to help students get to know each other better, the objective of warmers is to get them ready for a certain topic or task.  Fillers, on the other...Read More

iTeacher 2.0 – An app a day…

Olá, pessoal! Lá, no agora distante, primeiro post que fiz para este blog, prometi que iria falar de alguns aplicativos para dispositivos móveis, os famosos apps.  Pois bem, como sou bem pragmático, vamos direto ao assunto: seguem, abaixo, algumas dicas de programas que podem ser baixados, gratuitamente, para qualquer dispositivo que suporte iOS, o sistema...Read More

Revisiting ELT Mantras #4: Exceptions to the rule

Solo by Thomas Leth-Olsen CC BY-SA 2.0 Complete the following sentences: 1 Some is for positive sentences, and any is for negatives and questions. Except … 2 Present tenses refer to the present, and past tenses refer to the past. Except … How many exceptions to to the above ‘rules’ could you think of in,...Read More

Life Beyond Gap-fill?

In the 70s and early 80s, when functional syllabuses and communicative language teaching gained prominence in ELT, our profession was a relatively gap-fill-free zone. For controlled and semi-controlled practice, students were usually asked to engage in A-B exchanges, role-plays or any other activity types that included some degree of choice, information / context gap, personalization...Read More
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