Teaching English Blog

Language teachers deal with errors all the time and have different points of view on the way of correcting them. Some agree that only global errors have to be corrected. But what about the ones often repeated but being local ? So, there is a controversy about correcting minor errors or not correcting them at all. I believe that local errors also should get attention from the teacher's side but be more subtle and not overwhelming for a student. For this purpose, I prefer using different kinds of speaking error correction . Here are some of them: recast or shadowing (teacher repeats the correct variant of  what a student said Example 1:  Student: She goed to work yesterday.                     Teacher: Oh, she went  to work yesterday. Example 2: Teacher: What is the girl in the picture doing?                     Student: She speaks to her friend. ...

Are you familiar with the feeling that your lesson (term, year) went relatively fine but something could still be improved and you don’t know how to understand what exactly? Personally, I am. So, I decided to get all my ducks in a row. I found three ways of self-assessment:           checklists           open-ended questions           logic trees First, think of what your biggest concerns are (e.g. professional development, lessons and assignments efficiency, relationship with students and/or parents etc). And then think which technique works better for you. If you decide to dig deep then open-ended questions are for you. An example of such questions can be: “ How do I provide engagement in my lessons? ” or “ What part(s) of my lessons I would like to improve ?” Be honest with yourself and describe everything in details. A checklist is another, a little easier in analyzing way of self-assessm...

Oh, this exciting and uneasy feeling before starting a new course! Often, there’s only one chance to know your new students closer and it’s a placement test . But it’s not only about how much grammar the learners know. You need to learn as much information as possible with the minimum time spent. Here’s the list of things you most likely want to know about applicants: aims and reasons for language learning previous language learning experiences (if any), what was positive and negative was about them attitude towards language learning (and English in particular) expectations from the course and the teacher language level (if there’s any previous learning experience) If you’re struggling with what to include in your language proficiency part of the test, include some samples of material you are going to cover in the course. The material should be neither very easy nor too hard but still challenging. And remember to make your test relaxed and friendly, don’t scare your studen...

CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) have long been a dominant method in ELT. And its main focus is…communication, of course! The more target language exposure the better they said. But is it effective to restrict classroom language to English only? There are, obviously some advantages like: full immersion in L2 necessity to find new linguistic strategies from a student’s perspective development of contextual guess development of fluency especially in listening and speaking But throwing an unprepared student in the ocean of a foreign language can lead to distressing results like: stress and performance failures caused by a number of misunderstanding unwillingness to produce speech, “silent mode” growing feeling of self-consciousness, lack-of-knowledge complex decrease of learning motivation So, if you think that full immersion in another language is the best way of learning you might want to also put the consequences on the scale. What’s your opinion on la...