Issue 35

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Issue 35

Pre-Teaching Lexis Reconsidered

by Chris Ożóg This article sets out to explore the merits of pre-teaching items of lexis in receptive skills lessons, a standard procedure for many teachers when working on receptive skills in class. It is a technique that most trainees will learn on pre-service teacher training courses such as…

The Write Ideas

by Matt Parks If anyone has any trepidation when doing written freer practice in class with fears of slumped shoulders, audible groans and heads on desks then here are a few ways to spice up your clas

Accentuating the Cultural Aspects of L2 Writing: A Saudi Arabian Context

by Sulaiman Jenkins, Donald Peter Lambe and Dr. Motasim Badri For many EFL instructors in foreign contexts, teaching English writing will undoubtedly be a difficult task because writing, a very complex cognitive and linguistic skill, requires extensive time and practice to master. Students must…

DOS-ing All Over the World

by Nick Kiley Oh here we are and here we are and here we goAll aboard and we’re hittin’ the roadHere we goDoSin‘ all over the worldAnd I like it, I like it, I like itI li-li-li-like it, li-li-li-like itHere we goDoSin’ all over the world Rock dinosaurs / legends (delete according to taste) Status…

Unlock VYL Teaching

by Alex Bishop A handy list of key ideas for people taking on very young learner classes (3-5 yrs old) for the first time. Praise: Infants need lots and lots and lots of praise and rewards – use stickers or stamps on hands, congratulations on work well done, high fives, star charts, written comments…

Is your Institute Social Media Savvy?

by Emma Cresswell Sometime in 2009: “Emma, you’re young, you use computers, do you use this Facebook thing?” (My boss to me) And that’s how it all started. Fast forward to 2013 and I’ve been Online Services Manager at IH San Isidro for over 4 years. I’ve spoken at the last two DoS Conferences about…

CALL: Computer Assisted Listening Lessons

by Daniel Schulstad Listening is one of the hardest skills to master for the ESL/EFL learner (Chang, Tseng et al. 2011; Leveridge and Yang 2013). Learners in authentic situations struggle to decipher native-speaker speech in real time, as speed of verbal delivery, local accents, lack of contextual…

Handing Over The Reins

by Magnus Coney “Right, we’ve got a bit of an emergency. I was supposed to do today’s session, but we’ve just had a phone call from one of the teachers who is off sick. There is no one to cover her lesson, so Alina is going to swap sessions with me and I’ll cover the class. The problem is that the…

Special Interest Column - Young Learners

by Kylie Malinowska Some people call it the ‘Silly Season’. It’s that time of year again when, traditionally, YL teachers do the ol’ Christmas lesson. Over the years I’ve done countless ‘Christmas in Australia’ gapfills, letters to Santa etc. If done well, there’s nothing wrong with the ol’…

Special Report - Lexical Inferencing… A Chance to Demand High?

by Margaret Horrigan How to encourage informed guesses about the meaning of new words in the language classroom Preliminaries A quick research on the internet will provide you with a number of ideas on what inference is. We make inferences about situations, events, people etc. without formalizing…

Special Interest Column - Developing Teachers

by Sandy Millin Observations Observation: a word to strike fear into your heart? Or something you can’t get enough of? However you feel about them and whatever your level of expertise, observations should be a key part of your development as a teacher. There are as many forms of observation as there…

Special Interest Column - Technology

by Shaun Wilden Digital storytelling Once upon a time a teacher said to his class,” Ok, for homework I want you to write a story” and the class groaned but that was once upon a time! Digital storytelling has become a very popular activity in education. Defined on the digital storytelling website (1)…

Special Interest Column - 30 Things to Enhance your Teaching?

by Lizzie Pinard To celebrate my 30th birthday (18/06/2013), I made an attempt to identify 30 things that I’d incorporated into my professional practice over the preceding year. 30 is quite a large number, but having spent an academic year at Leeds Metropolitan University learning vast amounts while…

‘Motivating Learning’ by Jill Hadfield and Zoltán Dörnyei - Pearson

Reviewed by Danny Norrington-Davies Motivation is often cited as a reason for success or failure in L2 learning and for many teachers motivating their learners is one of the toughest jobs they face. Though academic study has explored these issues in some depth, motivational strategies are rarely…

The Company Words Keep by Paul Davis and Hanna Kryszewska Delta Publishing

Reviewed by Dan Cornford, IH Valladolid Twenty years after Michael Lewis popularised lexical chunking in The Lexical Approach, Paul Davis and Hanna Kryszewska take the lexical chunk and corpus analysis as the basis for their impressive addition to the Delta Teacher Development Series, The Company…

Published in: Book Reviews The Changing (Inter)Face of Learner Dictionaries

by Diana England, IH Torres Vedras Look at how the definition of the word ‘dictionary’ has changed in just six years: ‘a book that gives a list of words in alphabetical order and explains what they mean. …. a book that lists words in one language and gives translations in another.’ (Macmillan…