A nice introduction to using guided discovery to teach forms by Vicky Saumell.
Links
#ELTchat
Summaries of some interesting twitter chats about English language teaching
International Teacher Development Institute
Something to watch—an online teacher education site which seems to have roped in some interesting people as instructors / course writers / etc.
Thomas Farrell on Reflective Teaching
Thomas Farrell here outlines the case for and some approaches to reflective practice for English teachers.
(of course Adrian Underhill takes a slightly…different approach)
Story Soup Enterprises
For a few months now I’ve been collaborating with an actor and theatre teacher to think about ways of using theatre techniques, particularly storytelling and theatre games in language teaching. Eventually we’ll get a proper domain for it, but for now we’ve set up a little wordpress.com blog which you might be interested in.
Anki: another flashcard program
So Anki is a flashcard program that you can download, and, while it doesn’t include the little games that Quizlet has, it does let you include pictures and sounds, even video clips, in your cards and calculates how well you’ve been doing on a particular card and brings up for review more or less often on that basis. I’ve been using it to review my phonemic symbols (which have become scandalously rusty…or at least my memory of them has)
Say Hello Outside
90% of my classroom management takes place outside my classroom, seven minutes before class starts.
A small thing, perhaps, but it’s easy to forget, in the rush to craft that perfect grammar practice activity, or whatever, how important the first contact with your learners can be…every day.
Motivation (and lots of other stuff) by Zoltán Dörnyei
Zoltán Dörnyei is arguably the top researcher today on motivation in the language classroom and he’s made a whole lot of his papers and book chapters available for download, with nary an academic ‘firewall’ in sight.
Great Math Teaching Blog
Stop! Wait, I know, it’s a math teacher’s blog and this is an English teacher’s blog and math is supposed to be scary and all that stuff, but try ignoring the math part for a minute. It’s a great teaching blog—the author has a really well thought out, and kind of challenging to other teachers, teaching philosophy and approach, and he teaches, both by explanation and by great examples, how to make excellent use of images and videos in our classrooms.
It’s an inspiring blog for any kind of teacher…and it might even get you interested in math.
TED Talks as a resource
A collection of over 500 lectures which are usually informative, often inspiring, and sometimes, yes, a little wacky. Ranging from 3 to, more commonly, close to 20 minutes long.
What I really like about these lectures as self-study tools for students though are the subtitles. Many of the lectures have the option to turn on subtitles in multiple possible languages (one of which is almost always English). This means students can easily watch the video without subtitles, then, when the language gets confusing they can go back and turn on the subtitles for the hard to understand section. Admittedly, they can often do this on their TVs too, but these subtitles, at least the English ones, seem higher quality than the ones often available on television, and the range of subjects means there’s likely something there any student might find interesting, and the nature of the lectures, as lectures, makes them especially useful as academic English or test prep practice.
LearningFully 