TeachingEnglish newsletter 31 July 2019

TeachingEnglish newsletter 31 July 2019 Welcome to the TeachingEnglish newsletter! We've selected a range of practical resources to help you in the classroom and ideas to help you with your professional development, which we hope you find useful. The newsletter will be taking a break in August, but we will be back with more practical ideas in September. Have a good summer! The TeachingEnglish team Summer festivals in Britain In this lesson, for students aged 12-adult at B1/B2 level, learners will discuss what the key ingredients of a summer festival are, read some fact files about popular summer festivals in the UK and decide which one they would like to go to, read and find out information about the Glastonbury Festival, and finally get creative and design their own summer festival.  Who does what? – YouTube technique In this YouTube-based activity, students watch a scene from an animated film and observe the actions performed by characters. The activity is suitable for low level primary students since the focus here is not on listening. The technique can be used to review present tenses and vocabulary for daily routines and adapted for other cartoons or films. Nick Bilbrough - Zooming in and out For children in refugee camps around the world, where teaching materials, language exposure, and opportunities for communicative language use are severely limited, simple videoconferencing tools can facilitate a positive and motivating language learning experience. Reflecting on the work of The Hands Up Project, in this webinar Nick Bilbrough explores a range of activities that can help learners with both the bits and pieces of language (zooming in) as well as the wider picture (zooming out). Watch a recording. Two London parades compared This lesson for students at A2 level compares two of London’s biggest parades: the Lord Mayor’s Show, which originates from the same time as the Magna Carta, in 1215, and the Notting Hill Carnival, which has been held in August every year since 1966 and is one of the largest street festivals in the world. The lesson incorporates speaking activities, reading and some grammar. Video in language teacher education This report details and evaluates the range of video-based practices currently being used in language teacher education. The project also sought to build a community of practice among practitioners in order to share good practice. This is achieved through the following two online resources: a series of videos featuring various video-based practices in language teacher education (ViLTE Video case studies), and a ViLTE Project website providing access to extra resources. Sign up to our Teacher Educator Community to watch a recording of the webinar by the authors. ‌ TeachingEnglish training Every month we offer a 50% discount on one of our three-hour self-access training modules. Find out which modules are half-price this month. British Council teacher community on Facebook Join the British Council teacher community on Facebook to share ideas, resources and learning opportunities. ‌ Visit our website STAY CONNECTED ‌ ‌

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TeachingEnglish newsletter 24 July 2019

TeachingEnglish newsletter 24 July 2019 Welcome to the TeachingEnglish newsletter! We've selected a range of practical resources to help you in the classroom and ideas to help you with your professional development, which we hope you find useful. This week we feature three lessons focused on families to mark Parents' Day, which is held on the fourth Sunday of July in the USA. The TeachingEnglish team The Royal Family This lesson plan for teachers of teenagers and adults at mixed level explores the theme of the British Royal Family. Students will build their knowledge of the Royal Family and develop their speaking skills. Download the lesson plan and worksheets here. My family This lesson provides teachers and primary children with an opportunity to see different kinds of families that might better reflect their own experiences. In this lesson primary children do a series of simple and supported vocabulary and reading activities which lead to them writing about their own families. At the end of the lesson they draw pictures of their families and they make a classroom display of their texts and pictures. Blog of the month award for June 2019 Our featured blog of the month award for June 2019 goes to David Petrie (Teflgeek) and his post First (FCE) Speaking Video Lesson, which helps learners to understand what they should focus on when they do the speaking exam. Our shortlisted posts this month include a list of useful websites for learners of English and a video-based lesson plan about different accents. Start your journey to 21st-century education with Geo-Inquiry Geo-Inquiry, a teaching method developed by National Geographic, is a single method which combines all the needed activities for developing new skills. This method can easily be adapted and used from preschool to high school. Find out about the steps of the Geo-Inquiry process and see a summary of a theme-based unit developed by following these steps in this week's featured blog post by Milica Vukadin. Shakespeare and his family This lesson for learners at A1 level is about Shakespeare's family. It provides students with an insight into his family background and the lexis of family. Students will raise their awareness of Shakespeare's life, develop their ability to ask and answer questions orally and practise reading, writing, listening and speaking using the present simple. ‌ TeachingEnglish training Every month we offer a 50% discount on one of our three-hour self-access training modules. Find out which modules are half-price this month. British Council teacher community on Facebook Join the British Council teacher community on Facebook to share ideas, resources and learning opportunities. ‌ Visit our website STAY CONNECTED ‌ ‌

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TeachingEnglish newsletter 17 July 2019

TeachingEnglish newsletter 17 July 2019 Welcome to the TeachingEnglish newsletter! We've selected a range of practical resources to help you in the classroom and ideas to help you with your professional development, which we hope you find useful. The TeachingEnglish team Fake news This new lesson for older teenagers and adults at CEF level B1 and above looks at strategies for identifying fake news and fake websites. The lesson begins with a brief discussion about news and fake news. Students then skim read two webpages. One website is about the Tree Octopus (a spoof), while the other is about the Octopus Tree. After a brief reading comprehension activity, students study the websites, using a set of questions to help them. The goal is to discover which one is the fake website and why it’s fake! Three ways to end the school year strong Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist, suggests that we tend to make future decisions based on the 'peak-end rule' – that we remember how particular events and time periods end, and that our 'remembering selves' focus on the best moments among them. Given this research, it’s particularly important for us teachers to be strategic about how we end the school year with our students. In this blog post, Larry Ferlazzo describes three ways he tries to increase the odds of his students feeling energised about the final month of school. Invent a country This new short lesson plan is intended to provide a supplementary activity for primary learners who have been working on the topic of countries. Learners think about some of the features of their own country, then work together in groups to brainstorm ideas for a new country. Then they work in new groups to plan and produce a poster for their new country and use it to present their country to the class. Investigating the applicability of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for self-assessment in tertiary writing instruction in China: accessibility, effectiveness, feasibility and usefulness The current project investigated the accessibility, feasibility, effectiveness and usefulness of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and its companion European Language Portfolio (ELP) descriptors for tertiary English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing instruction in China and explored how they could be used to bridge teaching, learning and assessment. This publication is free to download in PDF format. An activity I use again and again – Rachael Roberts This is an activity which works at pretty much any level from pre-intermediate upwards. It works with classes you know well and with classes you’ve only just met. In fact, it is very useful if you have to do a last-minute cover with no time to prepare anything. The first stage is to tell students an anecdote from your life. Tell the students that the story may be true, partly true or completely false, and their job is to listen and decide which it is and which bits are true or false. Students then work with the structure of the narrative and work on their own anecdotes. Read more about how to use this activity with your learners. ‌ TeachingEnglish training Every month we offer a 50% discount on one of our three-hour self-access training modules. Find out which modules are half-price this month. British Council teacher community on Facebook Join the British Council teacher community on Facebook to share ideas, resources and learning opportunities. ‌ Visit our website STAY CONNECTED ‌ ‌

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