Teacher beliefs and research. Why do we do what we do?

This was the name of a talk I gave at a BC training day before Christmas last year. It basically came out of an article I'd read online by  B. Rosenshine, published in American Educator in 2012. I wasn't doing a lot of reading last year, just articles through twitter and blogs mostly, but this article really struck...

EAL Basics

If you have come into EAL suddenly and are not sure where to start, it could be a struggle to provide effective provision. I mostly teach pupils of a pre-intermediate (A2) level in KS3, as well as IGCSE ESL and based on what I have learned from my previous experience in ELT, here are some...

3 examples of authentic texts in iGCSE ESL

I decided to share 3 examples of the resources and tasks I've used with my iGCSE group recently (Year 11 - 15-16 yr olds) to boost and vary our exam preparation course. If you don't know what iGCSE ESL is, here's a link. I've been teaching this course for a few years now and for...

Animal Farm and ESL – some examples.

Orwell's Animal Farm is one of the novels the year 8 pupils (12-13 year olds) read in our school and last term I had a small group of pupils for EAL/ESL to guide through it. My learners are intermediate level learners, who need a lot of language work to develop tier two and three language...

Using ‘Editor’ in Microsoft Word to improve essay writing.

I have been doing a few of the free MicrosoftEd courses and have learnt about some tools which I think could be really useful for pupils as they navigate through essay writing and could boost the quality of an essay if used as scaffolds for writing. First up is 'Editor'. You can activate Editor in...

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas – an online EAL vocabulary lesson (Year 7).

Year 7 read John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas this year and some of my EAL lessons focused on the novel in order to provide language for understanding and expression of context, characters and themes. I taught most of these lessons online this year, so there are often questions and varied tasks for...

Building in interaction to online lessons in an international school context

Last week I shared some ideas with my school about building in interaction into online lessons combining my experience from ELT and E-moderation, alongside a few webinars I've watched recently. The first suggestion was simply to think of building in tasks to any text which was being presented making tasks active rather than passive. The...

IWBs – An #ELTchat summary 20/2/19

IWBs are, without doubt, a pricey investment for any school and although there is a risk that they can be used more as a marketing attraction for students than actual teaching tools, it seems many ELT resources now have accompanying software packages for IWBS which offer interactive exercises to extend learning. So are these great...

My notes from IATEFL plenary – What is SLA research good for anyway? (Lourdes Ortega)

These are the notes I took as I watched Lordes Ortega's IATEFL talk through live streaming. Most interesting points for me: the 'tremendous but under-utilised' research on multilingualism which 'clearly' shows the 'synergy' between languages. The more present an L1 or heritage language, the better the results with L2. I find this fascinating, as it...

EAL, ELT and all that jazz.

Ever wondered what EAL is? I have found out it's a bit like a cousin of ELT - they've got a lot in common, but aren't quite the same. Here's what I've discovered so far after a couple of months in EAL and this post is as much as about me getting it all straight...