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 …
Tag: English
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 …
More Notes on Creating Syllabi in Small Courses
I’m really into thinking about complex, sound course syllabi for my private courses. Besides my other hobby, writing worksheets for my classes and forcing my colleagues to try them out, thinking about “what we’ll learn” on a course is fascinating. That is to say, I’m not so much into collecting activities and whenever you ask …
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A Listicle!
I learnt two words from Matthew Noble: the word “listicle”, which had been completely new to me, and “life circumstances”, which is not new but is just the expression I needed. It’s Saturday evening, our place is quiet and I am back to blogging while giving up on watching a film with the rest of …
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 …
Office English 9 and 10 – Finito!
Lesson idea credit: Paul Walsh @josipa74 at http://decentralisedteachingandlearning.com/office-space/ Although the course finished about a month ago, I only got time to add the write up now. I’ll try to keep my writing less verbose, because my student, who also happens to read my blog, pointed out that the articles tend to be a bit long. …
Beyond conversation in one-to-one classes
When you get hired to teach somebody one-one, it is probably because the student wants individual attention and lots of conversation and speaking activities. They might even tell you “not to bother preparing, because all they want is conversation”. Well, I advise caution. Private lessons are very expensive these days and we, teachers, should provide …
Office English 8 – Members of the EP, Ungulates, and Other Translation Hurdles
This module had two main aims - firstly, to help students learn how to edit their own written texts, and secondly, to try a bit of Czech to English translation. Over the Office English course, I have collected quite a few written assignments submitted by the students and decided to run a lesson on editing. …
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Office English 7 – Contracts
It’s been a long day today as I found myself running between the Czech examination room (an important day for my Czech students), the Office English course and marking, so I’ll try to keep this short. The idea for today’s module came from one of the students, who said he often needed to explain the …
Teachers and translators talking together
Design credit: Václav Pinkava It is my great honour to introduce translator Melvyn Clarke on Angels and Lions. Melvyn is one of the few people to have mastered the Czech language to the point of translating novels into English. His translations include the ever-popular Hrdý Budžes, while the sequel, Onegin Was a Rusky, was published at …
Kamila of Prague 