Teacher Discussion Forums

Hi Florence I've assessed through role plays and found they can be very effective. However, how you could use them depends a lot on your teaching envirnment, especially whether you have to have all your students in the room while you test or could have them come individually or in pairs to test; how...

Ah, welcome to the fold Larry. :D Along wih your excellent caveat on the use of games, I'm pleased you've reconsidered your position. There's no need to worry abut eating crow. As it happens, my next lesson involves a reading activity with, gulp, all authentic text. Your original comments made me qu...

I don't think you have to get your coat just yet Larry, I' sure you'll get plenty of replies. :D I think your multiple choice options were far too coy; it sounds better than OK (the but comes later). I agree that having learners use authentic texts and discovery-learning has some big advantages. How...

Two of my favourites games - Running Pictionary: Especially useful to review present continuous if you'll be working with it. Play in 2 teams for five minutes at the start of the class. One student from each team has to run forward, look at your sentence and draw it. The first team to guess gets a p...

Hi Jason Thanks for the informative reply. I can see that science and multimedia would both be good ways of incorporating more learning through doing, especially in an ESL setting and for young learners. (I agree about TBL CBI and experiential learning all overlapping) I'm looking at its use in an a...

Hi I'm interested in what I've been reading about task-based teaching, and want to know if anyone's using it or has tried to use it, and with what result. I wasn't really aware of it until quite recently, so for anyone else in a similar position.... As I undersand it, following research (eg by Breen...

Hi Larry RP is Received Pronunciation, sometimes also called Royal Pronunciation. It's the kind of accent used by the Queen, Hugh Grant and all those 50's Brit war movies. : D As Stephen said, I think current estimates are that about 2% of Brit population use it. However, since this 2% represents th...

Lorikeet We sometimes use 'does he have', but more common would be 'Has he got...?' Yes, he has. 'Has' on its own is unusually formal. Re other differences, mwert, are Americans more flexible about past tense/present perfect? Have you had lunch yet? Did you have lunch yet? A Brit would only use the ...

Iain An excellent point about exposure, and of course you're right, that does play a big part. I should point out that I teach in a company where English is used as a lingua franca, so my students are already exposed to different accents. However, I think Larry's comment about listening with care is...

I'm with Larry on this one. However, I may be biased becasue I'm Scottish! Unlike the various 'accent trainers,' I don't think one accent is inherently preferable to another, provided you are understood. What a bland world it would be if we all spoke RP. And generally, I don't find students have sig...

I'm British, so I'll take your word for it that we're more flexible about collective nouns.

Raher than 'Staff receive perform-based bonuses at the end of the year,' would Americans say say 'staff receives ...?

Not planning to teach this; just curious

Or how about, 'I'll have the steak' There's only one steak?

Hi If you want them to speculate about the past, I've found that riddles of some sort are good for relatively controlled practice. The ones below are pretty much lifted straight of a great little book called Keep Talking. I used them on posters around the wall and in groups, student had to write a d...

First off, Lorikeet, I'm with you on using a variety of methods. In addition to 'students with a good teacher will learn regardless' I'd add, keen/good students will often learn regardless of the teacher (see Kato Lomb). Roger, the myriad differences between L1 and L2 (conceptualisation, L1 interfer...

I have doubts about centring textbooks and teaching around grammar points. Regardless of how communicative or functional activities are, it seems to treat English as a giant jigsaw puzzle that students can not only put together again but can use to create new aesthetically pleasing pictures, if only...