E V O L V E S C H O O L: British Council TeachingEnglish 10 October 2012

TeachingEnglish Newsletter

10 October 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 Adrian Underhill, Carol Read and Michael Swan.

LearnEnglish Teens

Welcome to our new website with material especially designed for teenage learners.

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

LearnEnglish Central
Develop your English, with language games, downloads, stories and articles.

BritLit
The aim of BritLit is to help teachers from around the world to exploit English literature in the ELT classroom.

Premier Skills

Communicate in two of the world's global languages - English and football

Welcome to the latest edition of the TeachingEnglish newsletter!

Our brand new blog of the month is Kyle Mawer's Digital Play designed to support teachers wanting to try online games in the classroom. And if you are looking for more ideas in using technology, we have a lesson plan on using mobile phones, a video tip on using powerpoint and an article to get you started on using blogs with your classes.

We also have a brand new seminar. Watch Chris Tribble and Ursula Wingate share examples of the teaching materials they are using in an EAP writing development programme.

And finally, if you teach children, why not check out our activities and lesson ideas on the Teaching Kids page of our site?

Enjoy!

Deb

TeachingEnglish Team | British Council | BBC

Lesson plan - mobile phones

In this lesson plan the students will have plenty of opportunities to express themselves on the use of mobile phones in public and how they themselves use mobile phones. They will create and perform telephone conversations, decipher mini text messages, then write and send their own. The lesson plan considers the importance of mobile phones for people today and how 'texting' has changed the way they communicate.

Seminar - Learning from learners, practical approaches to EAP writing development

This workshop presents a genre/corpus informed EAP writing programme for MA students. Following a brief overview of the theoretical and practical bases of the writing development programme Chris Tribble and Ursula Wingate share examples of the teaching materials they are using and give participants an opportunity to experience how the programme is delivered to students.

Watch seminar

Blogging for ELT

This article takes a look at blogging, which is becoming increasingly popular as a language learning tool. It gives an overview of blogging websites, suggests why you might want to use them, and gives some practical advice on setting up blogs for use with your own classes.

Featured blog of the month for September - Digital play

Our latest featured blog of the month is Kyle Mawer's Digital Play. Kyle is an English teacher and ICT co-ordinator at the British Council Young Learner centre in Barcelona. Last year his book 'Digital Play', co-written with Graham Stanley was published by Delta publishing and recently won the ELTon award for innovation in teacher resources.

Find out more

Tip - Powerpoint for teachers

If you have the right facilities in your classroom, powerpoint can be a very useful addition to your teaching toolkit. And if you're interested in some of the techniques mentioned here, there's another video that explains how to create the 'word bank'.

Teaching kids

This part of the site is for teachers working with children. It offers a range of activities and lesson ideas which are based around online materials from the British Council's LearnEnglish Kids website. Most of the materials can be used either online or can be downloaded and used in the classroom.