E V O L V E S C H O O L: British Council TeachingEnglish 03 May 2012

TeachingEnglish Newsletter

3 May 2012

Regular readers will know that the TeachingEnglish website has hosted a number of Guest Writers. Why not have a look at our archive where you can find articles and blogs by ELT luminaries such as Carol Read, Dave Willis and Michael Swan.

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Welcome to the latest edition of the TeachingEnglish newsletter. This week we are pleased to be able to announce the call for papers for TESOL-Italy's 2012 National Convention. TESOL-Italy's 37th National Convention will take place on November 16-17, and the deadline for submitting proposals is June 6th 2012.

We've got a simple pairwork activity that can be used with low level groups to provide practice in the present simple question form. Also for your classes this week we have a lesson which asks students to practise speaking, reading and writing while talking about the fastest and slowest animals.

There's a fascinating article about developing organisational and thinking skills alongside language skills. There are also some thought provoking ideas from one of our bloggers that might interest you.

If you only learn or teach one phoneme, make sure it's the most common English sound - the schwa. This week we've got an article which explains why the schwa is so common, and how to teach it.

Enjoy!

Sally

TeachingEnglish Team | British Council | BBC

Call for Papers for TESOL-Italy's 2012 National Conventionr

TESOL-Italy's 37th National Convention will take place on November 16-17, 2012 in Rome. The title of this year's conference is Language Landscapes with the three sub-themes of Revisiting Skills in the Digital World, Strategies for an Inclusive Curriculum and Situated Learning.

Pairwork: tai chi class

This is a simple pairwork activity that can be used with low level groups to provide practice in the present simple question form - What does he/she do on...?, days of the week, times and leisure activities. The lesson is designed for adults but could also be used with older teenagers.

The fastest and the slowest

The In this lesson students practise speaking, reading and writing while talking about the fastest and slowest animals. The grammar focus is comparatives and superlatives with quantifiers. Students also learn some unusual animal vocabulary.

Graphic Organisers

Visual representations of information are by no means an innovation in education. The use of graphs and charts to represent statistical information and time-lines showing the sequence of historical events have long been accepted tools, while in language teaching, the mind map is already a common aid to brainstorming a topic.

Behind Bars - English lessons in Prison

Thought provoking ideas from one of our bloggers who teaches in an unusual situation 'I don't teach as much as I used to but in the last week I've taught a professor of economics, a group of farmers, and of course, these men in jail....'
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Teaching the schwa

If you only learn or teach one phoneme, make sure it's the most common English sound - the schwa. Grammar words such as auxiliary verbs, pronouns, articles, linkers and prepositions are not usually stressed, and are reduced to keep the stress pattern regular.
Read more