Monthly Archives: January 2023
Formal or Informal?
Cut-ups and Kaboom! Students often struggle to distinguish between formal and informal language, and also to produce appropriately formal language when appropriate. Given that academic language is generally formal, and that my students need to be able to write texts of varying registers for their IGCSE E2L, it’s worth some time focusing on the features […]
Developing answers
Do you find your students sometimes struggle to develop their responses to prompts for Speaking exams? I used the “My Place In The World” idea to help students to broaden their thinking. (This could also be used to develop ideas for essays.) First I asked them to consider this question: Why is education important? and […]
EAL Conversations
“The first rule of EAL is to talk about EAL” As Head of the EAL department, one of my responsibilities was to deliver a short session on teaching EAL pupils at a summer-time meeting of NQTs held annually at our school. Instead of standing at the front and lecturing people on something they definitely had […]
Writing Mats for IGCSE E2L
I’ve created these writing mats for our IGCSE students to refer to whilst learning how to write the various genres of text required for the CIE IGCSE in English 2nd Language. They’re also handy for revising. You can download the ppt file under each picture. Please note: I didn’t write the model texts myself. I […]
Improve writing with confidence (using a model and the mark scheme)
In this activity, students “marked” a ChatGPT-generated text in order to become familiar with the mark scheme. As they had already tried the task, they noticed differences between this text and their own. (Spoiler: the text was grammatically sound and fairly well organised, but not amazing in terms of the organisation required by this particular […]
Features of Academic English: a poster.
As I see it, one of the most important aspects of my role is to teach academic English. Of course, all subject teachers are teachers of academic English too, but I’m aware that they are sometimes unsure about this part of their role. To make a neat little list of structural (pink) and lexical (blue) […]
A Hive of Activities 