Imagine a situation. You’re in the classroom, and the aim of the lesson or stage is focused on speaking skills. You tell students what you want them to talk about, and then…nothing really happens. Not much speaking is generated and what should have been a nice 15 minutes of animated discussion, quickly fades into two …

Continue reading "Speaking skills – getting students talking"

Imagine you walk to work every day. You look out of the window and there are a few dark clouds about. What might you do? I’d put my umbrella in my bag…just in case it decides to pour with rain when I’m half way there. Anticipating problems our learners may have is just like this. …

Continue reading "Lesson Planning – problems…problems…and solutions! Part 2"

Especially in the early days of teaching, figuring out what is going to be problematic for students is one of the more challenging elements of lesson planning. If we haven’t had much exposure to students, we may feel like we are making wild guesses. In the first of two posts about potential problems and solutions, …

Continue reading "Lesson planning – problems, problems…and solutions! Part 1"

What comes to mind when you think of dictation? For many people, it’s boring and teacher-centred activities where the teacher talks and talks and the students struggle to write down every word the teacher says. If that’s your belief, then read on for practical and student-centred activities and ways to incorporate dictation into many different …

Continue reading "Dictation – advantages and ideas"

Perhaps one of the more challenging aspects of planning and executing a lesson, is getting the timing right. How long will an activity take? When should I move on? Am I going too fast / too slow? How do I know? We’re going to look at these questions and more, and provide some answers and …

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celtatrain.com has begun producing downloadable materials for teaching. These were originally going to be sent via e-mail to subscribers, but we were worried about that being considered spam. So…instead we are announcing a new category on the homepage of the site – materials and resources. Here you will find a small (at first) collection of …

Continue reading "New feature…materials and resources for EFL/ESL"

In the first of a small series of posts on lesson planning, we consider possibly the most important thing to be clear about…aims. Why aim? It might first be useful to ask ourselves why we even need an aim. In other words…what is the aim of our aim? Well…firstly, if we don’t know what we’re …

Continue reading "Aims. How to avoid being aimless!"

When I was doing my initial teacher training course, we didn’t use coursebooks very much. While in the long-term this has created a strong interest and enjoyment in materials development, in my early teaching career, it presented a bit of a problem. Back then I had no idea how to use a coursebook to the …

Continue reading "Assessing and Adapting Coursebook Materials"

In most lessons, we deal with vocabulary to a greater or lesser extent, but are we helping students to remember and use this vocabulary after the lesson is finished? Students can often be seen dutifully scribbling away, compiling long lists of completely unrelated words and phrases. Everyone has preferences as to how to record and …

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What is a lead in? It’s the beginning of the lesson. The students have arrived. They’ve got out their books. It’s time to start the lesson…but how? With a lead in. But what exactly do we mean and what should it achieve? A lead-in should do exactly what it says – lead in to the …

Continue reading "Looking at lead-ins"