Would You Like a Native Speaker?

I confess that for a long time, I had been reluctant to write a post about language teaching and native speaking teachers, aka NSs, as they are often referred to in English-teaching circles, as opposed to NNSs – non-native speaking teachers. There is a great deal of controversy, the debate is way too polarised for …

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A Four-Year Anniversary Q&A Post

I was a very nervous and anxious writer when I started this blog exactly four years ago. Much has happened and changed since then, both in my personal and professional life, but this place has become my sanctuary when times were hard. I had asked my readers what they wanted to read for this post …

Osm poznámek k výuce pádů v češtině pro cizince

Teaching Czech Cases: Eight Ways to Improve English Summary: This post is about teaching Czech declension cases to the students of Czech as a Foreign Language; this is also the reason why I’ve written this article in Czech. There are a total of eight points I’ve covered, and these are: (1) Consider the students’ L1 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

What it Takes to Become Czech

Today I have the great honour to introduce a new author on my blog, Sean Miller, who taught for 15 years and now has translated for 15 on some of the intricacies of going native in Bohemia. Sean was born in the US but has a Czech citizenship and considers himself as Czech. In this …

Team Teaching – Blog Challenge

Back in the old day when I didn’t have this blog I used to envy those who did and could take part in blog challenges. Several people have said my latest Team Teaching post would deserve a blog challenge. Also, Tyson Seburn said recently I should do a blog challenge: https://twitter.com/seburnt/status/1028671200057286656 So here’s what I’m …

Team Teaching

Once upon a time, precisely in 1998, a young fresh holder of MA in French Language, Literature, and Linguistics (me) applied for a teaching job with a Prague-based language school called English Link. I got hired straight away and it was a start to my teaching career, which has been going on and off ever …

Mystery and Adventure

On the eve of the anniversary of the first post on my blog, I’d like to write something special. This blog is mostly about lessons that I myself have planned and taught. None of the lessons described was taught using a course book although it wasn’t my original intention. As I said in one of …