The value of going back to “Golden Oldies” in lesson planning Welcome to our first blog post on lesson planning! These blog posts were inspired by conversations we had during the writing of a new methodology and resource book on lesson planning, ‘Taking aim: Zeroing in on a great language lesson!’. So, what inspired this first post? Well, we think we cannot introduce or consider new principles and approaches to planning without revisiting existing ones. We work with in-service, developing teachers and sometimes experience some resistance to looking back at methods and approaches in ELT. “This ..read more

Imagine you are teaching 8-10 year olds and this is the next language point in the course book you are using. In this post we will give some tips on how to prepare using ABT! Taken from Gateway Gold level 6 grammar book 18/19, Garnet Education.  So, what does ABT stand for? AnalyseBeforeTeaching This is something you probably do a lot when you first start teaching- when your language awareness is perhaps more limited. In the lesson above, the language point is used to + infinitive. We use this to talk about habitual states and actions in the past. We often use it when we are contras ..read more

In our last post We Talk Pron: TLT we proposed that by making certain stages of our lessons more communicative and giving our students more opportunities to speak, we can give ourselves vital opportunities to hear their output and therefore respond to it accordingly (Teacher Listening Time). This means giving more space in our plan for student talking time and more space to do something with what we hear. This planning idea can be used in general terms in the context of any lesson, but it can also help us integrate more relevant pronunciation work into our lessons, which is often what teachers ..read more