Tag Archives: academic English
IELTS Problem-Solution Essay Helpsheet
I produced one of these for my students. Sharing it here in case yours would like it too. Click on the image to download it. In case you’re interested, the sample essay here was written by ChatGPT. (By the way, what text book do you use for IELTS? We use National Geographic’s Complete Guide to […]
Summary Skills Team Activity
Who says summary writing tasks have to be boring? My class don’t love summaries but they did love this lesson. The aims of this lesson were set by my students after filling in the ‘POST’ side of their post-mocks exam wrappers. They wanted to be more confident in identifying the key points in a text, […]
Paraphrasing activities & resources
Practising paraphrasing is so important for our students: it requires them to know vocabulary and to manipulate structures successfully. Doing it in pairs or groups means they have to be explicit about the process, further advancing their confidence and control. If you can name it, you can tame it! It is of course a skill […]
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 […]
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) […]
Academic texts – “Explain” tasks
This lesson came about because a Y10 student had asked me how best to write their ideas for a 6-mark extended response question in Chemistry. This sort of task presents a challenge for EAL students who may know the content well, but can lose marks due to their language. Students should be aware that they […]
16 things I learnt from the BAISIS Conference 2018
Since starting my job as Head of EAL at my school, I have been lucky enough to attend a couple of BAISIS conferences. BAISIS is the British Association of Independent Schools with International Students. It was reassuring to meet people doing the same thing as me, partly because a lot of the information and resources […]
All teachers are teachers of Academic English
I was lucky enough to secure a slot during a teachers’ meeting last week. Unfortunately it was just before an announcement giving details of a radical change to our timetable, so I know there were some anxious minds in the room. The main points I made were as follows: We all speak two Englishes – […]
Gallery Grammar Goals
My IELTS students are definitely getting to grips with the writing tasks for IELTS, but Grammatical Resource and Accuracy is one criterion they often score low in. The marking codes I use most often with this group are s-v (subject-verb agreement), T (tense), p (punctuation) and s. or pl. (singular or plural). The reasons for […]
A Hive of Activities 