Archive for the ‘Teaching vocabulary’ Category

Hopefully it’s just Mayday bank holiday rather than my lack of effort TEFLtasticwise recently that has seen a sudden drop in my number of views, but if only to make myself feel better I thought I’d give a list of where I’ve been making much more effort elsewhere, with links:

TEFL.net Idea Thinktank

15 fun ways to switch students onto graded readers

15 fun gapfill tasks

15 fun job application practice tasks- CV writing, cover letter, interview practice, HR vocabulary etc.

TEFL.net articles

15 common misconceptions about Business English and ESP

15 cultural differences in the Japanese classroom

15 more cultural differences in the Japanese classroom

15 criteria for a good cultural training lesson

15 more criteria for good cultural training lesson

15 important cultural differences in the classroom

15 more important cultural differences in the classroom

Onestopenglish (Macmillan) articles

Motivating teachers whose Business English students miss class

UsingEnglish articles for teachers

Why your students overuse their dictionaries- with solutions

70 characteristics of a good grammar presentation- possibly the longest article on this subject ever!

Why your students don’t want to do pairwork- with solutions and some pondering about whether they might not sometimes be right

Why your students still make mistakes with grammar they know well- with solutions and a call to relax when there are no solutions

The advantages and disadvantages of peer observations- with how to exploit the advantages and avoid the disadvantages

Things to put in a Self-Access Centre or Student Library- with tips on how to do it on the cheap

Why do my students question me?- with solutions

Why your students have problems with listening comprehension- with solutions

UsingEnglish.com articles for students (teachers might also want to have a look at what I am writing about them)

Why does my teacher make me read silently?

Why doesn’t my teacher correct all my mistakes when I’m speaking?

Why does my teacher make me learn the phonemic script?

UsingEnglish photocopiable PDF worksheets

Travel English pairwork B and V

Business and technical English easily confused words

CAE Reading Part Two match the quotes

TEFLtastic worksheets (pain in the arse to print out but worth the effort)

English for job applications/ HR worksheets

Cultural training worksheets for EFL classes

Requests and offers functional language review

The Roots of Medical English LP and 4 worksheets

And that’s it for TEFL stuff. The other thing I’ve been busy with is my wedding speech for the day after tomorrow, which could well mean that May will be an even less busy month in TEFLtasticland. Anyone fancy writing a guest piece or feeding me a story to keep the 1700 viewers I get on a good day entertained until I get back into the flow? If so, try the “Contact me” link on the right…

“Is “becuase”, with its 4,950,000 hits on a famous web search engine, the commonest typo in the English language? (more…)

It might have just been an excuse to quit my gym session early, but got a sudden urge to sort TEFLtastic out. That means that my new favourite site has helped me convert all the Medical and Pharmaceutical worksheets into easily printable pdf files, and I’ve stuck them in as Word documents so you can correct my spelling mistakes before you use them as well.

Now that you can download Word documents and make all the changes you like, I’ve also started including stuff that is the raw material for a good Medical English lesson but that I didn’t get to make into a good worksheet before all my Medical English classes disappeared:

More words from Greek

More medical word roots

And don’t forget to have a look at my own personal Usingenglish page for new stuff on there:

Looking for TEFL Xmas activities is like writing the list of presents you want from Santa- once you start there seems to be no end…

One really nice real-life task (because Santa exists in real life!) - sending emails to Santa. Students will also get a reply, apparently:

(more…)

‘There several pieces of research showing the negative effect of teaching several unknown words at the same time that are members of a lexical set. Learning several unknown words in such sets made learning 50–100 per cent more difficult.’ (more…)

More to come over the weekend, but here are a couple of stocking fillers to keep you happy until you can open the big lesson plans under the tree on Sunday or Monday:

(more…)

“A dollar a day”

(more…)

“Virtual water”

(more…)

Don’t know how new it is actually, but the BBC presenter on this week’s Digital Planet podcast didn’t seem to have heard of it either. The word is:

Voxel

(more…)

Even the name of this dictionary is a kind of pedantic trick (it’s actually huge, and only “shorter” because it’s shorter than the actual Oxford English Dictionary- which is 12 volumes if I remember correctly), and I have a feeling most of the words below are just as uselss as that distinction. Fun to know though…

I knew all these:

arctophile (a person who collects or is very fond of teddy bears)
izzard (a term for the letter Z)
pi-jaw (a moralizing lecture)
muffin-worry (a tea party)
struthious (like an ostrich)
twiffler (a plate or shallow dish)
webinar(a web-based seminar)
bidie-in (a live-in partner)
biffy (an American term for a toilet)
smoosh (squash or crush)
darknet (a kind of illicit computer network)
smart dust (miniaturized sensor/transmitters that are sprinkled onto an area such as a battlefield and used to analyze the environment)
size zero (more…)