18 maio 2014

by | in Lesson Ideas, Vocabulary

Music and teaching go back a long way in my career. In the beginning there were the Beatles, the Carpenters, Carly Simon, The Police, and any other band that my students happened to enjoy. We have all experienced the incredible mood-altering power of music and we've seen it melt away a bad mood in our classes. Not only does music help set the right tone for a class but it also relieves stress and helps students concentrate. But one question I often ask myself is how we can...

13 maio 2014

by | in Lesson Ideas

Olá a todos! Para os próximos textos, resolvi fazer um apanhado de dicas sobre o uso de histórias em quadrinhos na sala de aula. Sou um grande apreciador da arte sequencial —e colecionador, diga-se de passagem — e, ocasionalmente, utilizo quadrinhos como ferramenta didática. Inclusive, vale a pena mencionar que aprendi muito com quadrinhos, um dos meus grandes professores/mentores/Mestre Jedi comumente usava algumas edições de minha coleção como forma de incentivo à aprendizagem em nossas aulas. Embora ainda sejam vistos com olhos preconceituosos por muitas pessoas, os quadrinhos vêm...

02 maio 2014

by | in Lesson Ideas, Technology

Hello again! In the past few months I’ve talked about ways to make what we do in the classroom more relevant to our learners’ lives, particularly with regard to the inclusion of digital media.  This month I’d like to give an idea for how to change a typical English language writing task into a task that relates more to real life writing. Let’s take this task as our starting point. Write a paragraph describing your home.  If we look at a model that we could ask students to read to begin, it...

23 abr 2014

by | in Lesson Ideas, Pronunciation

Cecilia Lemos’s today’s post about the importance of intelligibility when teaching pronunciation made me think it is time I went beyond my two previous posts – where I talked about investigating Brazilian learners’ specific pronunciation needs and tackling their intelligibility problems – and move on to something more specific and practical. What do we know about what makes Brazilians more or less intelligible when communicating in an international context – i.e., using English as a lingua franca? According to a small-scale investigation I conducted (da Silva, 1999) using Jenkins’s common core...

18 abr 2014

by | in Lesson Ideas, Resources, Skills, Vocabulary

I picked this title from Goodreads' weird book titles. By the way, the title above is from a book by English author and academic Malcom Bradbury (1932-2000), whom I have never read and whose book I am now curious about. The reason why I  picked a random title for my post was because I wanted to  illustrate it with a simple task that fosters collaborative creative writing. I like creative writing tasks because they follow a very important principle that allows language to emerge in a real communicative...

06 mar 2014

by | in Lesson Ideas

Here's a second seasonal lesson idea.  This time based on Carnival.  In Brazil the holidays have just come to an end, and in my adopted hometown of Cádiz we're only half way through! I first used this lesson idea with a large class of mixed-level high school students but it can work with a number of different ages and abilities.  Most of the input comes from the students and it requires zero preparation (unless of course you want to kick off with an image of carnival as I've done...