Learning about learners
In my course we’re writing essays, and I summarized some recent learnings on learners. May not make for very exciting reading, but writing it all down does clear the mind of many, many cobwebs! Essay: ‘If we can train students to record their new lexis in a more useful manner, we can do a lot […]
Learning or using English?
What English course settings might a student in Germany experience? Evan Frendo’s professional development session at ELTABB cleared the cobwebs on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), a relatively new concept at the primary and secondary school level. I know it well from my own school days at The German School in Washington. Going through […]
Rhetorical styles
The PhD students looked at ways of incorporating rhetorical styles into their poster presentations. They were best at using the rule of three for repetition, but clearly need lots of practice in creating shorter, more powerful parallel phrases. I demonstratrated the power of cutting out needless repetition through this correction (which is still not ideal): […]
Stuart Brown explains play
I used the first 10 minutes of this video, with its wonderful photos of the male polar bear and the female husky at play, as an intro to my last/ 3rd day of teaching the PhD students, as they trailed in, to attune them to the idea that play allows us to do things we […]
Technology in teaching
On my Trinity DiplTESOL course we write essays, and they’re helpful to think things through. Here’s a long one I wrote about using technology in class. It’s based on my experience and is related to a talk I gave last November at BESIG, which in turn grew out of the ELTAS TechToolsDay. Louise Kennedy has […]
Putting my brain back in
Bringing together experience and theory at my old age causes all sorts of complications. Designing research of any kind to answer a question means you first need to figure out what exactly your data is going to be. What can you observe? How can you measure it? What tools can you use? What model looks […]
Observation
I’m looking for teachers who will be kind enough to let me observe them as a part of my diploma course. What I am supposed to do is design an observation tool, use it in class to observe teachers, and then inprove it. So the focus is not on evaluating your teaching, it’s on practicing […]
