E V O L V E S C H O O L: TeachingEnglish Newsletter 30 March 2011

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TeachingEnglish Newsletter

30 March 2011

A new Guest Writer will be with us later in the year, but in the meantime you can check out the archive of articles and blogposts from famous ELT names, such as Michael Swan, here.

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Children can develop their English skills with topic-based games, songs, stories.

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Welcome to this week's TeachingEnglish newsletter!

This year's IATEFL conference will be taking place soon in Brighton, England. There will be workshops, talks and symposiums with international presenters from over 60 countries. If you can't make it to the conference you will be able to follow it all online, find out more below.

Also this week we have an interesting article about teaching without coursebooks and an activity with a range of ideas for using songs in your classroom. There's a new workshop in our in-service teacher development series that looks at how you can introduce your students to process writing. Finally there's a request for help from one of our readers, can you help him by suggesting some ideas for materials for use in commercial institutes?

Best wishes,

Duncan
TeachingEnglish Team | British Council | BBC

Using songs in the classroom

Songs, if correctly selected can be highly motivating and can be exploited in many ways including gap fills, translations or dictations. It is important to keep in mind any language points and make sure the exercises have a clear focus. This page gives you a range of things you can do to exploit songs effectively.

Teaching without a coursebook

Whether you're starting with a new class or just changing direction a little the decision of how to structure a course without a coursebook can sometimes be difficult for a new or even experienced teacher.
Read more

IATEFL 2011: Brighton Online

The 45th IATEFL Conference takes place in Brighton, UK between 15th and 19th April 2011. The programme includes over 400 workshops, posters, talks, panel discussions and symposiums by international presenters from over 60 countries. If you can't attend the Brighton IATEFL Conference, follow the event online!
Read more

Process Writing 1

Writing, even in L1, is not easy particularly when compared with speaking, where reformulations, body language, clues from listeners can do much to compensate for a lack of precision or inaccuracies when communicating messages.

Writing stories easily

Here's another gem from the in-service training by Andrew Harvey that I enjoyed last week. It's a way to teach story writing that supports the learner every step of the way, helping even the least confident and timid among them produce nice, well-structured fairy tale like stories.
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Spoken English

I am a research scholar working on the topic: A study of materials and strategies used to teach English in commercial institutes. Could someone help me out in this? What are the kind of materials used and what strategies can be applied to teach?
Read more