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As a teacher in an English language school with a strong cross-curricular focus, I always try my best to bring authentic materials into the classroom. Humans learn more when they can experience the real thing, instead of just looking at pictures of it in a book. Of course, it is not always possible to bring [...]
Share the post "How to plan an exciting EFL museum trip (by Lesley Ito)"
Here I am, back from a short-term holiday and ready for my summer lessons! It is customary in Greece for the winter courses in private language institutions to end around May; towards the end of June schools resume preparations to welcome those students who are willing to finish one more English-language class by taking an [...]
Share the post "Tell a story! (By Christina Markoulaki)"
Creating a positive learning environment with few discipline problems is a goal of any teacher. We all want to give our young learners the best opportunity to succeed, but sometimes we forget that building this type of environment, much like tending to a garden, takes planning, effort, consistency and a fair amount of time and [...]
Share the post "Proactive Discipline–Tend to Your Garden (by Eric Kane)"
It’s Wednesday, 11:00, just a regular day at the high school. Two English teachers are sitting in the teacher’s room marking exams during their “free” period. Every now and then you can hear each one exclaim (or mutter, as the case may be) “How could he have possible written THAT?” or “How in earth did [...]
Share the post "The “Reading Pictures” Strategy (By Naomi Ganin-Epstein)"
Bringing food topics into the language classroom is one way to stimulate language learning as well as hungry appetites. 9 and 10 year old students in the 5th grade of our elementary school in Japan take part in an 8-hour lesson on varieties of rice in Japan. This Japan-unit is later followed by a similar [...]
Share the post "Rice in Japan and Rice Around the World (by Bob Middleton)"
“Aren’t teenagers too self-conscious to speak English?” “Do they care about the contents that do not appear in their school tests?” “Well… I wouldn’t want to get into that area…” I have been teaching teens as well as pre-school and elementary school children at my language school, English Square, in Japan, for the last 20 [...]
Share the post "Creating a Buzz in Teens’ Classrooms (by Mari Nakamura)"
I must admit that when Barb invited me to submit a guest post, I felt I wasn’t worthy of such an invite. Later, I thought… if she’d felt that I had something to contribute, well, then I couldn’t very well let her down, could I? Besides, one has to step out of one’s comfort zone [...]
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If you walk into a neighborhood in my part of Japan, you’ll see a display like this somewhere near the entrance. It’s a map showing all of the houses in a neighborhood, and the names of families who live in the houses. Do you have something like this where you live? Share the post “How [...]
Mark left a comment on a recent post of mine (How Context Matters) that intrigued me, about using lexical chunks with his young learners. I asked him to expand on his comment in a guest post, and Mark was kind enough to agree. ~Barb Share the post “Lexical Chunks for Kids (by Mark Kulek)”FacebookTwitterGoogle+
Share the post "Lexical Chunks for Kids (by Mark Kulek)"
I thought that a one month TEFL course and the fact that I am a native speaker of English would be enough to equip me to teach English. As I started to teach in Nepal, and later in India I slowly learnt many lessons myself. The most important lesson I learnt was to be genuine [...]
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