Writing Tasks – TBLT and Others

Recently I have been trying to encourage my (mostly but not solely Czech) students to write more and in this post I’d like to describe some of the practices we have been doing. I only just now realised that distance learning naturally lends itself to TBLT writing, as learners, deprived of the opportunity to speak …

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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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

Office English 6 – Business Reports

This lesson went really well even though I wasn’t trying very hard and probably because I allowed plenty of time for the writing itself. The aim was to familiarize the students with the structure of a standard business report and to write a business report in class. The nice aspect of the lesson was that …

Office English Lesson 2

Acknowledgements: I'd like to thank Vedrana, Marc and Jonathan for their help with this lesson and for being friends. In the second week of this course we focused on writing, more specifically, on the basics of writing emails. My goal was to provide students with a lot of opportunities to write, with clear guidelines for …

Office English – Lesson 1

How it all Began: Last autumn I was addressed by the management of the department at the university where I work. They asked me if I could design a 10 x 90 min Office English course to begin in March. I said yes. Those of you who know me are already aware that I always …

Warm-ups for Czech

I have a love- hate relationship with warm-ups. There have been times in my life where I had to do a warm-up in my class otherwise my ex-boss would get mad (I LOVE my ex-boss and we are still friends). Later, I realised that a warm-up planned for 10 minutes can easily stretch to 45 …

TBLT Czech Lessons – Task 5: Giving Directions – Part 2

In this post I will explain the procedure of teaching the adverbials of location and giving directions as indicated in my previous post. Each time I teach location, in whatever language I happen to be teaching, I use LEGO bricks. It may not be particularly original, but it’s the most effective method I know of. …