Two years into teaching EAP,  I had always been teaching on Reading and Writing courses. The curriculum contains an Extensive Reading (ER) thread that contributes towards the students’ final Reading score. I knew little about ER before teaching EAP and am became a big fan of this ER component. While not perfect and having a website for monitoring ER progress (mReader) that is somewhat open to abuse by students who simply just want to do the bare minimum to pass, for the students that get really stuck into it, there are many benefits: Building a reading habit. Learning to enjoy English ou ..read more

Ploughing through old blog post drafts to see what is worth working on, and came across this old (May 2016) but worth re-visiting reflection from back when I was teaching general English in the evening at a language school. Good times. It’s interesting to see which of the things touched on in this reflection remain influential in my EAP teaching now. These being: Taking photos of the board at the end of class, for my own reflections and to keep track of emergent language and nice boardwork. Trying to turn learner output into future classroom input, because texts that the students have made th ..read more

Looking back through old notes I found a lesson plan that used a slightly adapted version of the rap / song / poem in this Fluency MC video: This was a memorable lesson. It required bravery from the teacher, unless that is you are used to rapping in front of your students, and was an unusual way of playing with language for my students. Props to the one like MC Fluency ..read more

Gallery mingles (where you have a bunch of questions /  pictures / texts stuck around the classroom and ask students to walk around and talk about them) are a classic. Good for setting topic, peer review, and post-reading / listening discussion, I have always done them as a speaking activity. Why not do the same activity, but instead of discussing, the students write answers / notes / responses? I’ve not actually tried it yet but the idea seemed like a decent one for a class that doesn’t do enough writing, or is a perhaps a lower level writing class, or simply for a class that is tired of ..read more

This is a low-prep, high-tech vocabulary revision activity that focuses on pronunciation. Procedure: Draw a big square on the board, with the title: ‘Vocabulary we have studied that is hard to pronounce‘. Ask students to look back through their vocabulary notebooks (if they have one) or their coursebooks and find vocabulary they have studied that they think is hard to say correctly. As they are doing this, give out some marker pens and invite students to come to the board and write their words in the box on the board. To get them going I like to write a Vietnamese word that I find hard to say ..read more

Mondays are tough for everyone. The last thing you want to see is students arrive in drips and drabs, sit down as far away from each other as seems possible, and either a) stare into space; b) stare at their phones; c) apathetically flick through last weeks lesson notes; d) immediately ask to go to the toilet. To avoid this kind of situation and bring a bit of life to the classroom on a Monday, here is a simple warmer. Procedure: NB: Space-wise, you really need two whiteboards for this. If you don’t have that luxury, then you can stick A4 papers around the room, one for each student + 1 for th ..read more

via ELT Listening Material ..read more

Are we really teaching reading? 3 areas to integrate into reading lessons: Extensive Reading Reading Fluency Development Speed Reading Repeat Reading Intensive Reading Questions to think about: What type of reading do learners experience in class? What is missing from my reading lessons? How has today’s lesson helped learners tomorrow? Do students get a sense of failure or success in reading lessons?   Improving academic writing skills for EAP Big issues for students: Grammar + Lexis. The problem is ERRORS: frequency severity impact on understanding Diagnostic Writing Always give ..read more

At the end of the previous lesson, in pairs students wrote a dialogue trying to incorporate some language from a listening text. The phrases in question were: Oh you know, same old same old How do you mean? By the way,   In terms of what exactly?  After all I was wondering if you could… What are good friends for if… The listening text they were taken was pretty good and can be found here. In the following lesson, I gave back each pair of students their written dialogue with my reformulated version stapled to it. One example: The instructions were then to ‘find the differences betw ..read more

An alternative board race with translation. Works in monolingual classes. Not essential that the teacher speaks students’ language. Good for checking meaning and vocabulary review. Procedure: Put students into teams and play a board race to write a list of recently studied language: 2. Ask students to then write the translation next to each item: 3. Tell each team to carefully erase the English words, just leaving L1 4. Get teams to swap, so they are looking at the other team’s list. Now they need to try and write the English words next to the L1 list in front of them: 5. Encourage ..read more