Learning to Teach Better

Teaching corporate students and THOUSANDS of PAs, I often come across the use of acronyms in emails or instant messaging. Today's session has provided a considerable number of inputs for my future lessons (eg. re-writing words in full or viceversa - turn a message in its 'sms' version). Thanks a lot, Penny! :)

Personally, I’m terrible at teaching stress and intonation! That’s why I found the video proposed by Penny totally inspiring. When I started learning English 26 years ago, learning dialogues by heart was a must! I can still recall the very first dialogue I had to memorize, it was a perfect tool to acquire the correct pronunciation of a foreign language. Unfortunately, learning stuff by heart, together with drilling and using L1 in class, has been rather neglected by the more modern, communicative teaching techniques. Wrong. Learning by heart chants and dialogues and using them as a basis for the students’ own speech, so they can reproduce pace and intonation without mistakes, is a gem of an idea I’m going to use soon. It’s morale-boosting not only for the students, but for me as well!

I’ve always supported the role of L1 in apprehending a foreign language, and, when possible, I try to use the students L1, especially to translate some vocab items. Some student’s books are accompanied by word lists downloadable from the Internet for free, where the students can record the translation of the key vocab of the unit, creating their own, personalized glossaries. Unfortunately the overuse (or misuse) of online dictionaries, easier and quicker, but not always reliable and often misleading, could jeopardize the outcome of the activity.

Hello! where can I find the slides about the 1st session? thank you in advance!

Hello everyone! I'm glad to be part of such an amazing community! Just a few thoughts about today's session: - Hangman = it can be more student-centred, with the students coming up with the words and competing against each other. They may not learn sth new, but revise and practice vocab & spelling (the upper-level students keep struggling with spelling!). Is revising and practising not learning? - I may have missed it, but in the 'Recall&Share' activity the word 'existence' appeared twice: is there a reason? - A similar activity to 'Recall&Share': each student has a piece of paper, the teacher chooses a topic to revise (last or previous topic, eg 'the weather'), students have to write as many words as they remember related to the topic. The the teachers says 'STOP' and they exchange paper with their partners and add the missing words on their partener's list. The aim of the activity is to revise vocab (meaning and spellin...

Hello! I'm Jo, 39, Italian, TEFL for +13 years. I'm currently working and living in Bratislava, Slovakia, where I work for a small Slovak company that provides English language tuition to corporate students (GE, BE, life and employability skills, language coaching etc.). Since March 2017 I've been working as an ADOS as well, dealing with admin tasks and providing teacher training sessions nearly once a month. I'm expecting to be reminded of some teaching fundamentals we sometimes seem to forget after teaching for so long and to learn something new in terms of teaching and teacher's training techniques.