Now that the dust has settled, online teaching is fast becoming the new 'normal' for many of us and the knee-jerk emergency teaching measures are slowly being replaced by a renewed drive for ways of delivering quality lessons. One observation from the last two months of teaching online is that at times the digital platform [...]
As I lie on my sunbed with my toes covered in sand and nothing but my two small children to disturb my daydreams, I can truly understand the importance of maintaining a good work-life balance. While this would appear obvious to most, it’s something that as teachers we tend to forget as the lines between personal [...]
For many of us, the classroom is more than just a physical space, it is also a psychological construct where we have self-imposed strict rules of how to act, behave, conduct a lesson and respond to our learners. As we develop as teachers, I'm sure most of us will admit that we are guilty of [...]
Silence is not a word that sits very well with most language teachers. After all, we teach how to communicate, it's second nature to want to fill gaps with words. I know that when I first started teaching I wanted to fill every second of the classroom with some form of noise, whether it be [...]
Cambridge English Proficiency Exam (CPE) tests a wide variety of lexical terms; collocations, idioms and phrasal verbs. To do well you need to be able to use an extensive range of expressions, combined with advanced grammatical structures. Here are some particularly tricky sentence transformations (Part 4) which test your knowledge of the use of the [...]
Successful communication hinges upon the ability to express yourself, whether it be by spoken fluency, gesticulation, music or art. Having lived in Italy for the past ten years, more feelings and messages are conveyed through a series of body movements than through the accompanying stream of loud and passionate words that follows them. In fact so [...]
Art is a wonderful medium to use in the ELT classroom, it has so many incredible benefits as well as being fun and engaging. So here are 10 ways that you can use art in your lessons. Dictadraw Dictadraws are a great way to get students explaining things. It can be the teacher describing a [...]
2019 finally seems to be the year when people are standing up and taking notice of the devastating effect we are having on the environment. The entire ELT industry seems to be finally taking a little more responsibility for its environmental impact and, as we step away from the photocopier and embrace more environmentally friendly [...]
Languages are as alive as the people who speak them. They live, breathe, evolve and are influenced by their social and historical context. Therefore, a rigid non-flexible approach is ineffective in teaching as in order to own a language our students need to live it. We, as teachers, need to make sure that we do [...]
The Cambridge Young Learner's Flyers exam includes two different types of cloze activites where the students' grammatical and lexical knowledge is tested. Activities such as this one below will help students to think carefully about language patterns and to notice the most common ones which regularly come up in these cloze exercises. Download pdf version [...]
The Cambridge English Preliminary English Test (PET) relies heavily on students having a good comprehension of a wide range of language. Indeed, the first four parts of the exam are testing reading comprehension. From the official Cambridge website you can download the PET vocabulary list, and though while this is helpful it is in no [...]
As teachers our most influential tool, other than ourselves of course, is our board. It is often also the focal point of the classroom and so it is important that we make the most of our space. Let's face it, we're all guilty of classroom cardinal sins and so I'd like to suggest some ways [...]
Learning lessons from TEFL 