Oops, it appears I’m already halfway through Summer School at BC Ho Chi Minh City, so a post is well overdue. What can I say, I’ve been busy shovelling delicious Vietnamese food in my face between Brexit-wallow sobs. I love summer school as an opportunity to focus on teaching different age groups (young teens this year), as I… Continue reading Teen Summer School HCMC: Successes and Struggles
This post was inspired by an ELTJam post I recently came across and is also an excuse to… a. make my FIRST EVER GIF!!! and… b. revive cuisenaire rods. Poor little things deserted in the back of staffroom cupboards around the world. While avoiding the term l***ning sty*e here, I absolutely love the visceral handling of these… Continue reading My Life Story: Expressing the Hypothetical with Cuisenaire Rods
Another tried and tested activity that I came back to recently. It’s meant to encourage students to be more active listeners through use of back-channeling devices i.e. the things we do/say to show our interlocutor when we are listening to them. It’s particularly useful where one speaker is dominant, for example, when telling an anecdote, or gossiping.… Continue reading Back-Channel Bingo
The Word Formation task from the Use of English section in exams like CAE and FCE strikes fear (or boredom) into the hearts of students. While there is a finite list of English prefixes (malformed) and suffixes (formation), it’s an incredibly long one. Also confusing are combined forms with an apparent affix which is intrinsic and indivisible from the… Continue reading Suffix Poems: Making Word Formation Memorable
It amazes me when I meet a teacher who has never come across that TEFL classic “Back 2 the Board” (example here if you’re one of the unlucky ones). It’s just fail safe. Completely adaptable to level, language, situation, no prep, and I’ve never met a group of students yet, young or old, who don’t… Continue reading Pronunciation Mountain
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