More Speaking, Please

Teacher: What do you want to do in class? Student: Speak. I need to practise my speaking. Teacher: Ok, what do you want to speak about? Student: Eeh? Ahem…Not sure. (Thinking: You are the teacher, you tell me). Step forward if you’ve never had this conversation. The vast majority of my students want to speak …

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Changing the Focus in Extensive Reading

Something I nearly always try to include in my lessons is a “Book Club” – a fancy word for the simple activity of choosing a graded reader for my class and reading it in the lesson, chapter by chapter, as well as listening to the audio version provided on the MP3. I can’t really explain …

Lesson Module – Ancient and Modern Communities

(Mix of TBLT – CLIL – skills-based lessons) Writing just a very quick blog post, because I am so busy and haven’t got the time to write a longer piece, but I’ve felt so good about this module that I’d like to share. It’s one of the modules I’ve designed for my general English classes …

Course Planning: Removing the Guesswork

It seems to me that most of the posts I write are about course planning. The other day though, a Czech teacher of English asked in one of our private Facebook groups how to plan a conversation course in English; and I realised there can never be enough written on planning courses, especially those where …

GUEST POST – Interview with Czech Educator Mirka Smíšková

In this post I am so excited to introduce you to my colleague and friend Mirka Smíšková. Mirka and I met about two years ago after one of my blog posts made it to the Czech online freelancing waters and Mirka noticed it. We communicated over Facebook for a while, realised that we click, and …

Some random thoughts on the coming academic year

This is just a quick (and carelessly edited) post to get me into the practice of blogging regularly and also because I’m old school and I like old-school journal-style blog posts. So what awaits me in the new school year? Just yesterday I received the schedule from the two universities that give me work. From …

FIVE Mistakes Foreign People Make when Learning Czech

This post was prompted in a discussion thread on Czechlist, our Facebook group for language professionals, following a post entitled Ten More English Mistakes Czech People Make by my fellow blogger Tom Czaban. Somehow it was agreed by the group that in order to tilt the balance, a post should be written for the adventurous …

Second Blogiversary

Ahoj! These days, this blog is celebrating two years of its existence, and I wanted to do a special post for it. Last year, I wrote about the background of Angels and Lions; today, I am going to answer all the questions my readers asked me when I invited them on Twitter and Facebook. There …

Small Talk Around the World

This is a summary of an #ELTchat that took place on Twitter on April 17, 2019 and then ran in a slowburn mode for the next 24 hours. I took part in it because I had recently suggested discussing the topic. The idea had taken shape in the comments under a blog post on Small …

TBLT Lesson – Small Talk

I didn’t freak out the same way as I did last year when I was going to teach the High-Int Office English class how to welcome visitors and do small talk. This lesson was going to be for the Low-Int Office English course, which my institution runs this semester, and I had been asked again …