This is a dilemma I often face, especially with beginner or elementary students. Do you usually teach them the form ‘have you got any brothers or sisters?’ or ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters’? [Here’s an interesting discussion I found on this topic.] The dilemma stems from the fact that students often get confused, …
Category Archives: language systems
Delta task: Why teach sense relations
In the online Delta course I’m following, one of the tasks for the lexis unit required us to take notes on why sense relations can facilitate vocabulary learning and make lessons more interesting. It also required us to refer to examples of classroom activities and specific teaching strategies which we have used or intend to …
Present tenses timelines
Sometimes as teachers we take the present tenses for granted, especially with higher level students. However, as Parrot points out in his Grammar for English Language Teachers, students often have difficulties choosing the correct tense and tend to overuse the present simple. That’s the reason why I created a series of timelines to visualise the …
My 10 favourite English words
Hello and welcome back. It’s now proper autumn here in northern Italy, the time of herbal teas, roast chestnuts and new students. No wonder it’s my favourite time of the year! 🙂 To celebrate this amazing season, today I’m going to write something OT, which was inspired (copied?) by this blog post. I find it …
Noticing in action
Since English is my L2, I’ve started noticing how I retain new vocabulary since I think I can learn a lot as a teacher from this. Read this post to find out what I noticed and see if it is similar to your own experience of learning a second language.
Recycling Language in a Dogme Classroom
Since I will soon be posting about my personal Dogme experiments, I found this post amazingly interesting and useful. It’s quite old (2011) but I am re-blogging it here both as a reminder for myself and for those of you who missed it. 🙂