The Zone of Proximal Development is a concept that was introduced by Lev Vygotsky and is still one of the foundations for educational development together with Piagetian theory. I’m personally a big fan of the Zone of Proximal Development and it’s little brother, scaffolding. Whether this is teacher-initiated or self-guided scaffolding it doesn’t matter… finding [...]

Assuming you’re interested in be a professional teacher – as opposed to a backpacker that has no actual interest in teaching but needs to pay off student loans back home – then here are a few thoughts on different TESOL qualifications and how useful they may be.

First up, I may as well point out that [...]

What are the aims in the classroom when we teach pronunciation? Or more importantly, what should the aims be?

Many a school policy is designed to teach the “native” model of pronunciation, but is this a realistic notion? Not only does research suggest that the so-called “native” models of English are amongst the least intelligible but [...]

I think I’m safe in assuming that actively studying vocabulary isn’t very popular for most people. It’s something that is often tedious and associated with rote memorisation. This doesn’t have to be the case as there are a few other popular methods out there. Your best bet is to fiddle around and find out what [...]

Age old advice has been to keep a diary or journal as a way to improve your writing and general language skills. The problem with this advice has often been the inability to find someone to offer you corrections. Meaning that you’re quite often reinforcing errors.

That’s kind of a problem!

How to solve this mild [...]

When you think about it, the vast majority of people learn a language to speak it. It’s pretty obvious that that’s a big motivator. But a question that is commonly asked (”how can I improve my speaking?”) gets the all-too-often reply of “to improve your speaking you have to speak”. Sounds crazy right?

It’s not as [...]

“Scriptorium” is a nice term coined by Professor Alexander Arguelles, personally I just used to think of it as a writing exercise that I had been doing naturally. But now that it has a name that is becoming recognised in the language learning community it makes it all the more accessible.

First off, let me detail [...]

You’ve all heard of “listen and repeat” but have you heard of “shadowing”?

I won’t say it’s a little known concept because I know many language learners that have used this technique or something very similar in their own studies without ever encountering the term itself. They simply stumbled upon it themselves through their own trial [...]

Just like there are two sides to every story, there is no one text that will reveal everything. Your best bet to getting the full story? Treat your language study like your diet… eat something different from the menu whenever you can.

Not only would it get boring eating the same food day-in, day-out, but you [...]

Once you get to a certain level textbooks stop being all that useful. You know the material inside and out and there’s nothing new or challenging. So what can you do?

It’s pretty straight forward actually… Get your mitts on something real!

In short, things that were written by native speakers for native speakers are the next [...]