E V O L V E S C H O O L: British Council TeachingEnglish 21 November 2012

TeachingEnglish Newsletter

21 November 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
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!

This week we have a brand new blog of the month - CristinaSkyBox. Check out her latest post 'The power of quiet'.

And, do you remember Michael Rundell's seminar on the future of dictionaries? Well, this week's top story - no more paper dictionaries from Macmillan!

Finally, if you're looking for ideas and activities, this week we're focusing on writing. We have an article by Alan Maley on creative writing and an activity to get you started, a lesson plan on developing writing skills and a tip on how to give your learners a wider audience.

Enjoy!

Deb

TeachingEnglish Team | British Council | BBC

Featured blog of the month for October

Our latest feautured blog of the month is by Ana Cristina Pratas from her excellent blog CristinaSkyBox. Her post 'The power of quiet' looks at quiet time in classes and the difference between quiet and silence in class. In the post, Ana Cristina also discusses the value of technology and poses questions about how technology can enhance learning.

Macmillan to phase out printed dictionaries

Macmillan Dictionaries will no longer appear as physical books. The final copies are rolling off the presses at this very moment, and from next year, Macmillan Dictionary will be available only online. Since its launch in 2009, Macmillan Dictionary Online has seen explosive growth and will now fully replace the print version in a transition that, according to Editor-in-Chief Michael Rundell, can only be a positive one.

Creative writing for language learners (and teachers)

Creative writing normally refers to the production of texts which have an aesthetic rather than a purely informative, instrumental or pragmatic purpose. Most often, such texts take the form of poems or stories, though they are not confined to these genres. (Letters, journal entries, blogs, essays, travelogues, etc. can also be more or less creative.)

Developing writing skills: a news report

This lesson takes a process approach to developing writing skills. It is staged so that students are guided through the processes of collecting information and deciding how they will structure it within the text before they begin to write. They are then guided through the process of drafting, editing and redrafting the text to produce a final copy. There are also a number of suggested follow ups.

A creative writing activity: A dark and stormy night

This is an idea I learned when I first started teaching and still use to this day. The main focus of the activity is on developing writing skills, but it's also good for developing listening and reading skills and also for practising past tenses and descriptive vocabulary.

Publishing student writing

Sometimes my learners get really inspired by writing tasks and produce work where they really want to communicate something, so it seems natural to respect this and to give them a wider audience.