Teaching Skills Lessons

Article

Skills: assessing speaking skills

Teachers are often asked to evaluate learner progress during courses, maybe by preparing progress tests. Teachers often feel unsure as to the best way to do this. Here are some ideas.

Article

A third way

Hester Lott gives us some useful tips and suggestions for how to teach grammar.

Article

From paragraph to poem

Steve Buckledee employs a poetic strategy for getting students to examine language in greater detail.

Article

Awareness, appropriation and autonomy

In this article from the archives of English Teaching professional magazine, Scott Thornbury says that learning how to speak is as important as learning what to say.

Article

Natural language learning

Julie Moore discusses what learners' dictionaries can do for learners. The following article is reproduced with the kind permission of English Teaching professional.

Article

Teaching by numbers

Michael Rundell shows that word-frequency data is relevant to teaching and learning languages.

Article

Idiomaticity

Luke Prodromou wonders whether it still rains cats and dogs.

Article

Pronunciation - what are the limits?

An article discussing the problems faced when teaching English pronunciation.

Article

Teaching writing: the forgotten skill

Advice and suggestions about teaching writing in the English classroom.

Article

Teaching writing using the internet

Advice and suggestions about teaching writing using the internet

Article

Students who don't want to write

An article discussing ways to overcome the problem of students who don't want to write.

Article

Skills: teaching English using anecdotes

Learners are often keen to hear stories about the teacher's life (even if they are not 100% true!). Here are some ideas for creating richer, more varied personal anecdotes.

Article

Skills: teaching resources: sound effects

Sound-effect CDs are an exciting teaching resource. These are recordings that have hardly any words on - but instead contain a sequence of noises such as crashes, bumps, bangs, whistles, screams etc. Here are some ideas for using sound-effects in the classroom.

Article

Skills: telephoning in English

For many learners using the telephone in English is a particularly nerve-wracking experience. As well as all the standard "telephone phrases" learners need strategies for getting a failing interaction to work. Here are some ideas for confidence-building in class.

Article

Skills: whole-class discussions in English

Have you ever tried a whole-class discussion and, instead of speaking to each other, the learners direct all comments to you? How can you get more student-student interaction in such activities?

Article

Skills: the same old song

Songs are a popular resource with teachers and learners alike – but, when it comes to exploiting them in class, why on earth does it always seem to be gap-fills? Here are a few alternative ideas.

Article

Skills: under the spell of spelling

English spelling? “Wonderful! I love it!” If that isn’t your students’ reaction, you might like to try some of these ideas.

Article

Skills: longer reads

Students who do a lot of extensive reading in English seem to make substantial progress. Here are some general ideas for starting to use longer texts.

Article

Skills: graded readers

Reading a novel is essentially a private, personal activity – but it can still provide useful classroom work . Here are some ideas for working with graded readers in class.

Article

Skills: bringing dialogues alive

You can find short dialogues in many course books. How can you exploit these scripts and get them to come alive?