Contents

News and views

• The rise of TEFL YouTubers.
• Would you try to stop a student using a word/phrase that annoyed you?

ELTjam article https://eltjam.com/the-rise-of-the-tefl-youtubers/

Eat, dream, sleep English https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu4AP8qmYnXNUipUeyPQKig

Cork English Teacher https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6fnXJCXnygCc6O1ZSMO43Q

Exercise of the month

Revision auction

This exercise works well as an end of week activity when revising language that has been used in class during the week. To do this, you need collect examples of both good and bad uses of language that has come from your class that week.

1. Divide your class into teams.
2. Write up sentences the class have used (both correct and incorrect) from earlier in the week.
3. Ask the teams to bid for the sentences that they want.
4. Allow the teams time to correct the incorrect sentences or find the correct sentences.
5. Go through all the sentences as a class, awarding points for correct answers.

This activity works well as it allows students to work together and identify their existing errors in a comfortable, collaborative manner.

Word of the month

Contrastive analysis: The practice of comparing L1 with L2 to identify the similarities and differences between them with a view to highlighting areas of difficulty for language learners.

Interview

Adrian Underhill talks about comfortable intelligibility, world Englishes, and improvisation in the classroom.

Teacher’s dilemma

You’ve prepared a lesson for a class of 12 but only 2 studentsshow up. What do you do?

Q&A

1. What are the essential elements I need to include in a lesson plan? How can it be less time-consuming?
2. How can we help shy students speak more confidently even if they don’t have a large vocabulary?
3. What are some quick, sure-fire ways of increasing student motivation?