You’ve probably seen lots of recent discussion about gender representation in children’s story books and in education materials. You can see some of my previous posts on the topic here and here, with regard to ELT materials specifically. The hype around recent publications such as Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls has done a lot to raise awareness of the dearth of female role models in children’s books, and to try to redress the balance. It’s much needed. A recent Guardian article  cites some alarming statistics – in a study of the 100 most popular picture books of 2017, lead ch ..read more

Whether you are a teacher preparing bespoke materials for a class, a writer, or an editor doing content development work, at some point you will probably find yourself scouring the internet for ideas and information. It can be a time-consuming business. I’m going to use this post to pull together some of my favourite sites for materials development. In case you are not already familiar with it, the IATEFL Materials Writing Special Interest Group has an excellent resource page full of useful links. Start there! It’s free for everyone to access, so you don’t have to be a member. There’s also adv ..read more

Last week I attended the fourth ELT Freelancers’ Awayday, a highlight in the calendar of many freelance editors in our industry, myself included. I can’t possibly capture everything from the day in this post, or begin to do it justice really, but there were some recurring themes which jumped out at me, which I thought I’d try to summarise here. Theme #1: Finding new opportunities and working in new ways Sarah Patey, Karen Spiller, Jo Sayers (ELTjam) and Deborah Tricker (Richmond) participated in the panel discussion, entitled ‘Broadening Horizons’. It covered ideas for broadening your cli ..read more

This week marks the first birthday of Emily blogs. Yesterday I also found out that this blog has been featured in English Teaching Professional’s list of 20 blogs to follow in 2018. Looks like I’d better keep writing, then! You can see the lovely things they have to say about it here, along with lots of other recommendations for favourite ELT blogs to follow. It’s been an exciting first year of blogging for me, and I think we’ve covered a lot of ground in the twenty posts published so far! From graphic organisers to assessment, retention strategies, and nursery rhymes… plus lots more. Fin ..read more

Many teachers choose to incorporate traditional songs and rhymes in their English teaching. But what are the advantages of this? And are there any drawbacks to using this kind of authentic material? Why use traditional songs and rhymes? Songs play a vital role in early language development among very young learners. Songs expand learners’ vocabularies. Because nursery rhymes are characterised by alliteration, rhyme, onomatopoeia and strong sound patterning, they are particularly valuable in helping children develop phonemic awareness (the ability to hear sounds in spoken words), which is an e ..read more

‘Mistakes are the portals of discovery.’ James Joyce The opening of the Museum of Failure in Sweden has been in the news in recent months. The museum is noteworthy because as a society we’re often reluctant to admit to our failures. But this museum takes a different stance. It celebrates the prototypes that didn’t work out. Yes, many of these flops are funny. The fat-free crisps that give you diarrhoea, the biro “for her”, the green ketchup. Curator Dr Samuel West says, “I was tired of all the success stories.” What he’s really interested in is WHY these products faile ..read more

Young learners are notorious for forgetting things. Not just their pencils and books, but also all the vocabulary or structures you carefully presented and practised only a lesson or two before, which they seemed to have such a good grasp of at the time. Teachers of young learners know that this is a fact of life, and regular recycling of language has always been a (frustratingly) necessary aspect of classroom practice. Neuroscience, meanwhile, is revealing more about how memory works and how we can make teaching and learning more effective by incorporating some simple strategies to aid retent ..read more

I am delighted to be the guest writer for the IATEFL Young Learners and Teenagers blog this month. I’ve written about materials development, and have tried to come up with a helpful checklist of things to consider when writing resources for early years and primary-aged students. You can read the post here. Comments welcome! It’s certainly not a definitive guide so I’m sure you’ll have plenty of other suggestions to add to the list.   Photo credit: Pixabay       ..read more

You’ve probably heard a lot of buzz around graphic organisers. They’re often used in mainstream education, and this is having an influence on ELT and CLIL methodology. This post sets about answering two questions: why they are important, and how you can use them to best effect. What is a graphic organiser, exactly? Before we go further, I should clarify what we mean by a graphic organiser. Venn diagrams, matrices, tables, charts, bar charts, pie charts, time lines… these are all good examples. They’re also sometimes known as key visuals. A graphic organiser is a tool t ..read more

Already widely employed in the mainstream, Assessment for Learning, or AFL for short, is gradually gaining importance in ELT. We’re starting to see references to it in some primary and pre-school courses and it’s begun to feature on conference programmes, too, with Sarah Priestley giving a great introduction to this topic on this as part of the IATEFL Young Learners SIG pre-conference online event in February, for example. This post will cover the basics of AFL and give ideas for how to get started, and what the benefits could be. What does it mean? How is AFL different from self-ass ..read more