As a teacher, I must often think about the central question of how to help my students with their English study efforts. Many of my students recognize that they need to work hard outside of the classroom to improve their overall English ability. The question of “what to do” then becomes central in their minds […]
I’d like to respond to Zhenya’s fantastic post titled “Did You Like My Lesson?” over at the wonderful “Wednesday Seminars” teaching blog. In the post, she talks about the tendency to give vague positive feedback to a teacher who you’ve just observed and is expecting praise in return. The questions she asks in the article are […]
On Sunday, June 21st, I had the pleasure of taking part in a #keltchat, which is kind of a discussion on twitter with other language teaching professionals. Although the “k” stands for “Korean”, I’m not a teacher in Korea. That hasn’t stopped me the community from welcoming me. I’ve had nothing but positive experiences on […]
I was really excited to see the June 21st #keltchat topic was about vocabulary learning. Vocabulary learning is something that I place a good deal of importance on in my classroom. Consequently, I spend a lot of time trying to help my learners increase their English vocabulary. I recently read Scott Thornbury’s excellent blog post called “V is for […]
A guest blog by Neil As this is my first dreamreader.net blog, I’ll tell you a little about myself and what I’m doing. I teach at a university in Japan, and I’m originally from the UK. My job has its frustrations, like any teaching position I guess, but on the whole I thoroughly enjoy my job. One […]
In a recent #keltchat, a group of teachers discussed the idea of learning from bad class experiences. What I took away from the great contributions is that, generally, teachers know they will never have perfect classes. On the other hand, we still seem to find it hard to accept or make sense of the negative ones. I’ve […]
If you’re looking for something simple and quick for your class to read, dreamreader is great because you can just download the PDF version of our articles and hand them out to your class. But there’s so much more you can do with them then that. Here are some ideas for extending the life span […]
#KELTChat is talking about using textbooks in ELT so I wanted to write a quick blog post about them today. As a teacher, textbooks have always been a big part of my professional life. They line the shelves of my office, fill my classes, are shoved in my briefcase on the way to class and […]
Okay, that title is a bit silly but stay with me here. If there’s one skill that English reading can make you good at, it’s predicting. What does ‘predicting’ mean? It means that you can know the future. The best thing about it is that you don’t need any special powers. You just need to […]
Recently, there was a great discussion on #keltchat about the kind of advice you would give yourself, as a teacher, if you could travel back in time. This was a very useful exercise for me. It made me consider the changes in my attitudes and assumptions over the course of my teaching career. I realized, […]
