Quando não ensinamos os jovens a fazerem as próprias escolhas, acabamos por deixá-los à mercê das escolhas dos outros. Quem foi que decidiu que não podemos confiar nas escolhas dos jovens? Read More
Escolhas, escolas e caminhos
Educação Reflexiva
Apesar de já ter inúmeros textos publicados em inglês sobre educação, resolvi que é o momento de também começar a publicar em português. Portanto, aqui na página (que será reformulada), você agora poderá seguir um blog em inglês e este recém criado blog em português. Como? Bem, basta clicar no link com o título Educação Reflexiva,… Read More
Do conversation-driven lessons make any sense? – Part 3
“But, quiet, my fair lady. I shall now tell the tale of the brave Sir Dante. This brave knight travelled great lengths to seek his justice and help his king defeat an evil wizard who had overthrown the king and sent the princess far, far away, to a land where no one had ever returned… Read More
On Native Speakerism
I’ve learned English as a foreign language. I only travelled abroad to put my English to the test after I’d been teaching it – also as a foreign language – for quite a few years. The large majority of my English teachers were also ‘non-native speakers’ (and I use the inverted commas for the same… Read More
A will or a whim?
We are all able to learn what we want to learn and we will stay at it as long as it takes until we’ve developed our skills, or amassed as much knowledge as we want to. Regardless of lessons, if we want to learn, we will. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. We’ll manage to find… Read More
Accountability: the teacher and the learner
On my last post, I suggested that the best way to focus on students’ learning is by focusing on teaching. The rationale behind this is that we can’t control someone else’s actions or thoughts, but we can control our own. This means that if we pay attention to what we can actually do in order… Read More
How do you focus on your students’ learning?
Lately, it’s become mainstream to state that we should focus on students’ learning. By saying that, we account for the obvious expected outcome of a teaching & learning environment – students’ learning. Currently, with all the debate on the impact of technology in the lives of children everywhere, it’s pretty obvious that we’re more likely… Read More
Working with discrete vocabulary items
It’s a given that learning words in isolation is not particularly helpful when it comes to learning a foreign language. Words rarely appear in isolation when we communicate, and ELT has come a long way from the days in which vocabulary appeared as single words in a vocabulary box to the presentation of manageable language… Read More
Do conversation-driven lessons make any sense? (Part 2)
Language is quite a complex system – one which we try to organise according rules and norms. One of the common ways for us to think about such organisation is prescriptively, the way many of us were taught a second or a foreign language. If we look at what David Crystal says about prescriptivism, we… Read More
Do conversation-driven lessons make any sense?
The short answer to this question is a resounding ‘yes’, and I could base my answer on experience – mine and also the one’s from lots of colleagues. However, we should all be wary of such things as “it’s worked with all my groups,” or the converse “it didn’t work with any of my groups.”… Read More
