Tag Archives: reflection
Exam Wrapper for Listening exams
Have you tried exam wrappers? I recently learnt the term ‘exam wrapper’ through some EduTwitter posts. In case you haven’t come across it yet, it’s a short form (or ‘metacognition worksheet’) that students fill in before a test, designed to help them evaluate their learning and think about what they can do to prepare for […]
Am I a subject teacher or a support teacher?
The role of an EAL teacher in independent schools can be confusing for both the teacher themselves and their colleagues throughout the school. Although it seems obvious now, it took me quite a while to figure out that actually my fellow EAL teachers and I have 3 distinct roles. a support teacher, helping those learning […]
Learning how to ‘do’ EAL
How did you come into EAL? How did you learn / are you learning how to ‘do’ it? If you’re like me, you came to EAL from a TEFL background or somewhere else in ELT – EAP, ESOL, etc. Others I have met have come to it from an MFL background, and I imagine mainstream […]
We’re not in TEFL any more, Toto.
If you’re anything like me, you get a lot out of putting your ideas and thoughts into writing. It allows you to process what’s going round your head and writing it down means you are forced to make it into a fully-formed thought. In doing this, you create something solid. You can go away and […]
Language, Memory and Storytelling
The themes of sessions I chose to go to at the NATECLA conference, although they focused on different topics, seemed to have in common something to do with the roles identity and memory play in language learning: we want to use language to express ourselves and we need to remember what to say and how to […]
What the ELT is this job?
I haven’t posted for a while, and that’s partly because there’s been a lot of changes going on. I’m back in the UK, for a start (Yes, of course I miss Spain!), and have landed a job in an area of ELT that’s new to me: teaching international students at a boarding school in the UK. […]
Teachers like us
When I first declared that I wanted to teach English as a foreign language, a friend of a friend told me “But teaching English is for losers.” I don’t tend to see myself as a loser and it wasn’t what you’d call a helpful comment so I stashed it in my grudge pile until this […]
Three years at IH Huelva: proper job
If I could go back in time and tell my newbie teacher self 10 things that I’ve learned about teaching over the last 3 years, I wouldn’t, because half the fun is in working it out for yourself, isn’t it? But this is what I might say if I did: Your colleagues are a top source […]
A Hive of Activities 