Culture in the classroom.. is this something that the students need or want? This argument can very much go both ways and much of it relies on what exactly your students want, but one model for the classroom isn’t likely to please everyone… as you’re not doubt aware.

On the one hand we have the ongoing [...]

I’m sure as language teachers that this thought goes through our head a fair bit. It’s not a difficult decision for most languages since there is the standard. And yes, while there are varying dialects and accents, there is typically the one golden standard that we can revert to. Let our students fall back on [...]

I’m sure if you’ve been a teacher for any length of time you will have stumbled more than once at creating a valid and reliable test for your classroom. The question is, why are we always struggling along attempting to reinvent the wheel? Countless people before us have researched and implemented successful assessments for the [...]

As a teacher it is ultimately up to us to decide what our students should be learning… but on the other hand, it’s also up to the student to let the their teachers know what they could be learning. This is where needs analysis comes into play.

Teachers aren’t mind readers as much as we pretend [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Krashen introduced the theory that we acquire language via comprehensible input. That is to say that if we are exposed to language at a level we understand then we can begin to acquire it. This ties in with my strong support of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, which can be basically broken down by saying [...]