Tag Archives: reading
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, […]
Highlights and thoughts from the English UK SW Conference
Since working at the University of Durham, I’ve been doing my best to earn a living in my home town of Exeter. It’s not as easy as it was in Spain because most jobs are zero hours and the money doesn’t go as far as in Spain. There’s also the feeling that we teachers of […]
Adapting Academic Reading Circles for a short pre-sessional course
This has been Week 2, or the first full week (minus the bank holiday) of the pre-sessional course. The students have been learning about thesis statements and how to organise their ideas in their essays, what it means to participate in a seminar, how to get the most out of a lecture, and they’ve done a timed essay. […]
Teaching English For Academic Purposes: my first experience
For the last week I’ve been in delightfully dinky Durham. Three days were spent on a super well-organised and enjoyable induction course for the university’s PARSE (Preparatory Academic Research Skills and English) programme, after which I met my students, helped them get orientated and taught their first classes. EAP is something new for me and the […]
Text summary and analysis
This is a great way to get Proficiency students (although it could be adapted for Advanced or FCE students) reading, finding useful vocabulary in the text and sharing it with each other. I got it from the inspiring Elspeth Pollock who gave a talk on teaching CPE students in Seville in February. She reminded us that […]
CPE: Run For Your Life! – Halloween Lesson Plan
This lesson plan is based on an article from The Guardian called Zombie Games: Run For Your Life. It’s about a 5k run called Zombie Evacuation Race where “zombies” run after you and “soldiers” shout at you. This lesson involves CPE exam style tasks – Speaking parts 1 and 2 and also Reading & Use […]
A Hive of Activities 