Learning to Teach Better

Hi everyone! I hope you're well and still come on here from time-to-time to look back at the great course we did. I'm going to be co-editing a Special Supplement called Current Trends in Teaching Vocabulary for the ETAS Journal next Spring and would LOVE to hear your thoughts and practical ideas! Please see the Call for Papers link attached and let me know if you want to get involved in this exciting edition. It would be great to have you aboard and your expertise will feature alongside a number of well-known names in ELT (including Penny, too, hopefully :-) ) The deadline is September 30th so no rush. Looking forward to hearing from you! https://www.e-tas.ch/journal/calls-submissions/etas-journal-spring-2019-call-papers

A 2017 news quiz for back to school! http://leoxicon.blogspot.com/2017/12/news-quiz-2017.html

For anyone fascinated by languages! I'm currently reading his book, The Etymologicon and it's brilliant. http://blog.inkyfool.com/

Slide p 59/64 Social media and literature have really played a significant role in my classes. I have also used both in tests. Please take a look at ex 3 below.

For error correction I tend to use the most frequent type of correction, recast. I believe I use it because it's quick and doesn't harm fluency and communication entirely. But like Penny Ur mentioned, this type of correction all the time may be ineffective and may I add fall on deaf ears most of the times. Research shows that the best correction methods are elicitation, metalinguistic feedback and explicit correction so I feel I need to use more of these methods when correcting my students. Also, sometimes I let errors go by uncorrected mostly because I consider them minor or unimportant errors but there are times when students notice them and correct them. Perhaps it's best the teacher corrects all errors and not the students because it could come across as if the teacher wasn't listening or doesn't care and because learners would rather be corrected by the their teacher than their peers as research shows.

I would like to comment on reading out loud and on guessing from the context tips. For the first one I would like to suggest my method. At first, me, the teacher read the text aloud so that students grasp the pronunciation. Then, I give time to students to read it silently in order to understand it and asnwer the clarification questions. In the end, I ask students to read it again aloud, play roles or change their voices in order to practice pronunciation too. This technique concerns younger students. As far as the guessing from the text is concerned, it is very amusing to let the students' imagination come in surface.