English Celebrities

Linda Dunsmore Teaching Ideas It’s Black History Month! Now, Black History often falls short in EFL classrooms but if you are able to include it into your EFL curriculum abroad (and you should!) here is an important reason to do so: You get to focus on the amazing culture, history, and contributions of Black people, something a lot of EFL students would never otherwise learn. Hold a class meeting to introduce the topic and explain why a month of Black History is needed and brainstorm some famous Black people the students know. This is also a great time to read aloud “Our People” by Angela Shelf Medearis. In this book, a father is telling his daughter about the history of their people - how they were kings and queens and invented amazing...  [Read more]

Linda Dunsmore Teaching Ideas Teaching speaking skills is an important part of an ESL class. Sometimes, entire conversation classes are established that focus solely on speaking. Here are 7 great games for your ESL conversation class. Write down the names and key points about five celebrities and assign them to the same amount of students in your classroom. One by one, a student enters a “party” with another student playing the host. The host must then find out the identity of each guest by having a conversation with everyone. Have your students stand in a circle. Choose a specific grammar point and have the first person asks a question using the grammar structure. The student then throws a ball to another student who answers the question...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas The world is an ever-changing, molding, and evolving into something else than what it was yesterday. It is a constant flow of new ideas, ways, life, and society. It doesn’t stop and won’t stop. This can make it hard for the individual to keep up with, adapt, and change. Especially, in society today that is full of technology and constant fast expansion. Technology that was new two years ago is old today and considered slow. A person has to do everything they can to be up to speed or fear being left behind. This isn’t easy and can be hard. However, with this advance in technology, not everything is bad. It has brought about the era of social media and connectivity in the world. People from other lands and...  [Read more]

Linda Dunsmore Alumni Experiences When it comes to learning English, non-native speakers can feel quite torn on whether they should learn British English or American English. They have their similarities, but can contrast each other strongly. The differences can be confusing for English speakers as well. The diversity in spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary can really throw you off. In this article, I will be focusing on these three topics. Let’s explore spelling, shall we? This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Tabitha C. Growing up in the USA, I learned to spell in a simplified form. American English focuses on how the words are pronounced, therefore the words are spelled according to their sounds. Kələr in the British...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas The capacity for learning is present in people of any age and the desire for education and knowledge should be nurtured and celebrated to the best ability of not only the student but the educator as well. Because education is something that people seek out for the duration of their lives, the role and processes of an educator are incredibly diverse and are many times determined by the specific educational situation. One of the biggest determinations of the teaching processes and style arises when one considers the age of her students. Though a teacher may use songs and games when teaching children, her approach to teaching adults would be very different. Young learners acquire information in different ways than...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Teaching Ideas Stories expose the students to more language, they engage and motivate the learner, they can be used to teach the structure of a language and the concepts about print which may be different between cultures. Stories with images can also help the students anchor their knowledge about the text. Listening to stories also helps the students hear accents and how words are pronounced. However, it is important to choose the correct book or story for the students you are working with. If familiar storylines are chosen the student is more likely to understand the story. It is also important to take into consideration the interests of the students and to find text on those topics. This post was written by our TEFL...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Learning a new language can be a wonderful experience. However, its success depends on several factors. Personal propensity above all. By this, I mean interest and passion for whatever language it is we have set our minds to learn. More often than not this propensity involves a sort of an innate talent which makes it easier for some students to master specific language skills. The right hint of motivation goes hand in hand with the environment. At a very early stage, this environment is represented by our teachers, masters, and tutors. Their ability to pass on the interest of another language will be crucial. How are we ever going to enjoy foreign language classes if they are carried out in a monotonous and...  [Read more]

Linda Dunsmore Teaching Ideas In a previous post, we looked at various teaching ideas for future simple and here we’re going to describe some fun ideas for teaching three other future tenses. There are a wide variety of usages for future tenses and it’s always important to make sure your activities focus on the usages that you’ve taught in your lesson. For example, future continuous can be used to talk about an ongoing action at a point in the future, a fixed future event, polite enquiries or to predict the future or the present. Predicting the present is one that students often have trouble conceptualizing, so we might as well start from there. When someone we care about is going on a long journey we often think about what they might be...  [Read more]

Mark Crocker Teaching Ideas Of the four language skills taught in an ESL classroom, listening skills are often overlooked as teachers can be unsure how to make these lessons interesting and relevant to their students. However, as listening skills are a fundamental part of the language learning process, it is vital that we give them the classroom time they deserve. The good news is that there are many ways to make listening skills lessons both fun and productive. Here are 6 ideas for livening up your lesson plans. One simple way to engage your students in a listening lesson is to use popular culture as a tool. Most students would much rather listen to music, TV shows, movies, or podcasts than sit through a dry monologue from a textbook. To add...  [Read more]