E V O L V E S C H O O L: British Council TeachingEnglish 09 January 2013

TeachingEnglish Newsletter

09 January 2013

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

English Agenda
The British Council's UK home for ELT and research

Welcome to the first 2013 edition of the TeachingEnglish newsletter!

We have our first webinar of the new year on the 16th January - aspects of classroom-based teacher development with Willy Cardoso, and if you missed Dave Dodgson's webinar just before the holidays on classroom management with young learners, you can watch the recording here

This week our top story is a report on a recent study into how babies learn about vowel sounds before they are born!

And for the classroom we have new articles on LearnEnglish Teens, a lesson plan on Dorset Life to develop your students' listening and notetaking skills, and a tip on correcting your learners' written work.

And, finally, why not start off the new year with one of our online training courses?

Enjoy!

Deb

TeachingEnglish Team | British Council | BBC

Upcoming webinar: Classroom based teacher development - 16th January 2013, 12pm UK time

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In our January webinar, Willy Cardoso will be looking at various aspects of classroom-based teacher development including approaches that start inside the classroom, involving our learners, self- and peer-observation tools, critical teacher development and more.

Babies learn about native vowel sounds before they are born

It has long been known that babies learn about their native language from listening to their mother from inside the womb. A recent study has discovered, however, that babies as young as one hour old respond to new vowel sounds from a nonnative language, showing that unborn babies learn about and can distinguish sounds even at the phonemic level.

New articles on LearnEnglish Teens

Check out our latest teen articles including ideas to develop exam techniques, the wealth of video material available for classroom use, what young British teenagers are like these days and more.

Dorset life

This lesson is part of a series of plans based on interviews with people from around the UK. It focuses on developing students' knowledge of a part of the UK, as well as practising their vocabulary and listening skills. It also aims to help their ability to take notes while listening to quite a challenging audio script.

Writing correction code

This is a common tool to optimise learning opportunities from mistakes learners make in written homework and to encourage the editing stages of process writing. You show the learners where the mistakes are and what kind they are, and then they try to correct them as a second stage to the initial writing task.