Newsletter 2021#18

Good morning

Had a great week this week- a big walk in the Lake District has really cleared out some cobwebs! So what have I got for you? Some thoughts from a whole range of people on keeping learners speaking in the class (and in English), a new grammar quirk and a new series of interesting videos from John Hughes. Here we go....

Something old
Keeping learners speaking can be tricky - if you teach in a monolingual class, how do you stop them speaking L1 to each other, and in any class, how do you motivate them to speak? Here are a couple of resources to help. The first is a video I made a while ago with an amalgamation of ideas that I crowd-sourced from Facebook on keeping them speaking in English and the second is a link to a talk by one of my favourite teacher educators, Penny Ur, on Getting them to talk in English (when they don't want to). Try some of these things out and let me know how you get on.

Something new
My 'something new' this week is another in my series on Grammar Quirks. I have to say that I'm really enjoying making these, so if you have any suggestions for them, feel free to send them in!  This one is on the many uses of that common or garden word 'like'.

Something Borrowed
John Hughes is a materials writer and teacher educator and (IMHO) incredibly talented. I'm not sure how long he's been making videos but I've only come across them recently. They're short, engaging and usually around the topic of materials and lesson planning. His YouTube channel is here and I particularly liked this one on low level English with high level interest and this one on how to create board games for language teaching. Take a look and see what you think.

Hope you have a good week and see you next Sunday.

Best
Jo