Honestly, I hadn’t really planned to write a follow up to my previous post. However, things just seem to happen in a certain way and you have to do your best to adapt and make use of them to your advantage. I’m a strong proponent of meaningful and interesting conversation used to promote professional development.… Read More
Unplugged or Dogme?
I’ve been reading lots of excellent posts about teaching unplugged, dogme, coursebooks and others in the blogosphere recently. There are also a couple of challenges around that I’m looking forward to having the time to participate in. One of the things that called my attention was the focus that people have given to the name… Read More
Minimum requirements for (language) teachers
How do you know if you’ve met the minimum requirements to walk into a language classroom and teach? Is there such a thing as minimum requirements, to begin with? Shouldn’t teachers be ‘lifelong learners’ themselves if they expect their students to learn new things every day? Will I be able to really help my students… Read More
Language and thought
Does language shape thought? Or does our way of thinking is one regardless of the language we speak? Can we think of an object, or a concept if we don’t know the words to use for such? What happens then, when we know for sure we want to convey a thought but we don’t know… Read More
Is there such a thing as THE method to learn a second or foreign language?
I’ve been kindly invited to write a guest post for Mango Languages blog. If you still haven’t visited their blog, I recommend doing so. There are some very nice articles and insightful posts. I’ve decided to republish the post here after a couple of things I’ve observed in a couple of websites and some talks… Read More
Pronunciation, Grammar and Vocabulary
There are three things involved in knowing a language, and these have been called “the ‘what‘” by Penny Ur in her “A course in Language Teaching“. The three ‘whats’ would be pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. Needless to say, there are lots of things involved in each one of these topics. For instance, when we’re talking… Read More
Take care of the little things first
I must say I was quite jealous when I read about this classroom here. It does seem to me to be the kind of classroom that surely enables learning. All learners are actively engaged in whatever it is they are doing, they’re “saving the trees”, learning life-skills, and all that with little interference from the… Read More
Why bother?
Why should I know this if I won’t be teaching it to my learners? This is a question often asked by some of the language teachers I’ve recently talked to when discussing about grammar, phonetics and phonology, and different methodologies. Well, in my opinion, there are certain things teachers must know. Teachers are supposed to… Read More
My ELT library (part 3)
After a long while without posting due to some new things that came up, I can finally resume my blogging activity. There are lots of things to write about, but I’ll continue the series of my ELT library and books I consider very important for any English teacher to have. Books on vocabulary and teaching… Read More
My ELT library (part 1)
I’d thought about publishing a list of ELT books I usually recommend to teachers I work with, but I’d never really got to doing it. There are lots of ELT lists of books for teachers on Amazon and other sites that I thought it wouldn’t be exactly helpful. However, after a very brief exchange of… Read More
