TeachingEnglish newsletter 27 April 2016

TeachingEnglish - the global home for teachers 27 April 2016 Welcome to the TeachingEnglish newsletter! This week we have a NEW lesson plan for kids to celebrate St George's Day this month. For teens and adults, we have activities to develop listening skills, particularly listening for specific information. We also announce an interesting NEW publication on how the CEFR is being used in China, and that registration for our next Primary Essentials course is now open. And finally, if you missed the British Council Signature event at IATEFL this year - Shakespeare lives - you can watch a recording of this lively session. We hope you find these resources useful. Deb TeachingEnglish team Teaching kids April is the month when St George's Day is celebrated. In this lesson, pupils read the story of St George and the Dragon and work in pairs or small groups to produce pictures for different parts of the story. Using only their illustrations, they practise their speaking skills by retelling the story. Go to the lesson plan Teaching teens 'Listen for your word' is a simple way to improve students' concentration during listening activities. This activity, from a talk by Jeremy Harmer can be used with different levels. All students have to do is listen, pay attention and have fun. Try it in your class. Go to the activity Teaching adults Do your students need to practise listening for specific information? These activities are good for training the students to hear everything and to identify individual words. They are challenging but students can see an improvement. You can do these kinds of activities regularly and they needn't take up a great deal of time. Go to the activity Development Primary Essentials provides teachers with an introduction to teaching English to young learners aged 7 to 11. Using video, audio and community elements, you will learn the essentials to help you succeed in your teaching of young learners. Course starts 26 May. Find out more Events If you were unable to attend the British Council Signature Event at IATEFL Birmingham - Shakespeare lives: love, hate, death and desire in English language classrooms - you can catch up with a video recording of this practical, thought-provoking and interactive event. Watch the recording Magazine 'Investigating the practice of The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) outside Europe: a case study on the assessment of writing in English in China' explores the CEFR in relation to its current profile and use in China, and considers its possible application in assessing the writing of English by Chinese university students. Read more You have received this newsletter because you registered on our website or previously showed interest in British Council news. If you wish to opt out of future newsletters please unsubscribe here.

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TeachingEnglish newsletter 20 April 2016

TeachingEnglish - the global home for teachers 20 April 2016 Welcome to the TeachingEnglish newsletter! After a fabulous IATEFL conference we are back this week with more resources and news. To start, you can catch up on all the plenaries, conference sessions and interviews you might have missed at IATEFL Birmingham 2016. If you work in a low-resource context, you can check out our NEW training resources, which include primary and secondary stories of success. We also have a brand NEW blog of the month award. Chia Suan Chong posts 5 reasons why native speakers need to learn to speak English internationally. For the classroom we have Fairy Tales for kids, and Find the murderer for teens. And finally, watch a recent video talk by Raymond Murphy on his publication English Grammar In Use. We hope you find these resources useful. Deb TeachingEnglish team Teaching kids Fairy Tales provide a wealth of possibilities for teaching English topics. Each fairy tale has its own magical setting and is split into several scenes. Within each scene there are sets of vocabulary that you can exploit. This plan looks at a few of the better known fairy tales and highlights some of the possible areas you can concentrate on in class. Go to the lesson ideas Teaching teens Find the murderer is a speaking and listening activity for teens and can be done with different levels. Students are involved in play-acting, using their imaginations, and are encouraged to practise using the past continuous tense. Go to the activity Teaching adults On 18 March, Raymond Murphy visited Russia to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the first publication of English Grammar in Use. Invited by The British Council, Murphy spoke of the difficulties learners face when teachers use grammatical terminology that isn't necessary. Find out more Development Throughout the world English is often taught in 'low-resource' classrooms, but there are few training materials which are derived from and which reflect this reality. The materials presented here are intended to help fill this gap. Find out more Events IATEFL Birmingham 2016 may be over but you can still catch up with what you missed. You can watch videos from the all the plenaries, conference sessions and interviews you might have missed. You can also find the plenaries, 37 conference sessions and over 50 interviews available to watch here on IATEFL Birmingham Online, all free of charge to access. Find out more Magazine Our featured blog of the month award goes to Chia Suan Chong and her post 5 reasons why native speakers need to learn to speak English internationally. Do native English speakers need language training in order to communicate successfully in an international context in their own native tongue? This is the interesting question that Chia Suan Chong raises in her blog post. Read more You have received this newsletter because you registered on our website or previously showed interest in British Council news. If you wish to opt out of future newsletters please unsubscribe here.

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TeachingEnglish newsletter 06 April 2016

TeachingEnglish - the global home for teachers 06 April 2016 Welcome to the TeachingEnglish newsletter! Join us once again for IATEFL Online! If you can't attend the 2016 IATEFL Conference, don't forget you can tune in for live coverage starting Tuesday 12 April. To continue our celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this week we have 7 brand NEW lesson plans for kids! We also have an imaginative project lesson for teens - 'Design a mobile phone', and an article on how to turn authentic WWW texts into useful activities for adults. If you're interested in using video with your students, check out Jamie Keddie's blog post 'Digital scissors and sellotape', to find out more about the skills that allow us to manipulate video as material. And finally, registration is now open for our popular CLIL Essentials course. PLEASE NOTE the TE news will be taking a break next week, but we would encourage you to join us live and online at IATEFL 2016. We hope you find these resources useful. Deb TeachingEnglish team Teaching kids We have 7 new lesson plans celebrating the life and work of Shakespeare for you to use with your young learners to accompany the short animated videos of six of Shakespeare's plays - Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, plus Shakespeare's life and extension activities!   Go to the lesson plans Teaching teens 'Design a mobile phone' can be used with all levels and could be extended to a mini-project for younger students. Students should work together to design the next generation mobile phone and be encouraged to be as imaginative as they can.  Go to the activity Teaching adults The world wide web offers a myriad of opportunities for authentic English reading texts. Any good teacher can turn a reasonable authentic reading text into a useful and fulfilling activity, so why not take the same skills you might use with a newspaper article and turn them to good use, bearing in mind various aspects of the newer medium that are peculiar to it. This article 'Designing a WWW reading task' gives advice on designing tasks based on the internet. Go to the article Development Registration for our popular course, CLIL Essentials, is now open. If you are teaching school subjects in English, then this course will provide comprehensive training on the methodology and practice of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) you need in your work. The course starts 09 June and is 15 weeks long. Find out more Events Join us for one of the highlights of the English Language Teaching calendar. If you can't attend the 2016 IATEFL Conference, tune in for live coverage starting Tuesday 12 April. This year - once again - the British Council is teaming up with IATEFL to provide online coverage of the 2016 IATEFL conference. Watch live plenary sessions, interviews and over 50 conference sessions. Coverage starts each day from 9.00 am (UK time). Join us for IATEFL Online! Find out more Magazine What are the basic technical skills that we need, as teachers, if we want to use online video in the classroom? The skills that allow us to manipulate video as material - skills that can be referred to as 'digital scissors and sellotape'. Read Jamie Keddie's blog post about the everyday skills that allow us to copy, paste, cut, edit and share. Read more You have received this newsletter because you registered on our website or previously showed interest in British Council news. If you wish to opt out of future newsletters please unsubscribe here.

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