Teacher Discussion Forums

Thank you Sally!
Those are some interesting papers.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for titles dealing with teaching academic writing? Both theoretical and more practical approaches would be much appreciated. The course will be focusing on teachers presenting their classroom research findings as part of the ICELT. I'm thinking along the lines o...

What about this:

"Employees need to learn how to take greater initiative at the workplace."
or
"It took initiative to do it."

What about "taking initiative" as in "Mike is good at taking initiative". Does that sound wrong to you?

I'm Canadian and I live in Brazil, teaching mainly exam courses (IELTS, CAE, CPE). IELTS is dominant internationally and is gradually gaining ground even in the US from what people tell me. I'm more familiar with British universities and publishers anyway, so working with the exams is natural for me.

IELTS definitely requires paragraphs, it's just that you won't be penalized for not indenting them. It's more likely a practical consideration rather than a stylistic one. It's ultimately a language test and indentation is probably something that occurs too randomly in the compositions to be conside...

I suppose it's a historical reason, with the British empire and the concentration of knowledge in Cambridge and Oxford. ELT publishing in general is quite British indeed, assuming you thought it would be automatically dominated by Americans.

I caught myself saying this the other day:

If he redos his composition, I will adjust his mark.

Does it sound ok to you (I admit it looks strange)? If so, is it because the prefix makes you intuitively recategorize the verb as regular instead of irregular? Am I going native?

Some of the answers to your questions could possibly vary according to the specific genre the students are writing in. What kind of compositions are they writing? UCLES and IELTS do not penalize lack of indentation. Check your university handbook for incoming students and see whether the writing gui...

Then again, SFG almost by definition concerns (has to concern) itself with texts and textual analysis, so really any book you might care to get will have a fair number of examples and analyses drawn from a variety of authentic texts (and usually there is an analysis of at least one reasonably exten...

This one's for Woody and Heath!* http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/184706440X/ref=sib_rdr_dp (Matthiessen et al, Key Terms in Systemic Functional Linguistics . Continuum 2010) *Actually, that should really be 'This one's for Sally and Geordie!'. :wink: :D Can you recommend a title for in-depth cov...

Howatt notes in his history that Sauveur, a French immigrant to New England, preceded Berlitz with his "natural method" which was for all intents a direct method. But we have no evidence of Berlitz officially acknowledging Sauveur (whatever).

The OP might enjoy I.S.P. Nation's "Teaching Vocabulary: Strategies and Techniques" Heinle 2008.

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Vocabula ... 1424005655

Go to the Gulf. You can research your options on the Middle East Forums.

I suppose I should add that in Applied Linguistics my general impression is that Emergentism or Connectionism holds more sway than Innatism. I think it's fair to say that Rod Ellis is fairly critical of Innatism and concludes that it is losing ground in AL in his revised Study of SLA, for example. I...