Newsletter 2021#26

Good morning

First of all a big 'thank you' to all of you who wrote to me to say that you'd missed my little missive every week - I really appreciate all of your emails. Got some more great stuff for you this week so let's dive in...

Something old

We kick off with a video that I made waaay back in 2013 looking at three different frameworks for grammar presentation - PPP, TTT and TBL. I warn you now, it's a lot longer than the videos I tend to make now (it's over half an hour!) but it's still the most popular video I have on YouTube, so see what you think. This one is mainly for those of you who are doing CELTA or in the early stages of your career.

Something new

It's been a little while since I added to the 'Grammar Quirks' series, but I was asked a great question about 'yet' and 'already' and so here are a few interesting thoughts on those rules that we trot out in class, that work most of the time, but perhaps don't tell the full story (and this video will only take four and a half minutes of your life!)

Remember that if you'd like some great ideas for making your grammar teaching more engaging and interactive, check out my Teaching Grammar Communicatively course. It's been going like hot cakes over the summer and I've had some great feedback on it.

Something borrowed

Finally, this week, probably for those of you a bit further along the career road, if you'd like more of a deep-dive into Task Based Learning, I came across this Routledge book on the subject that is Open Access. That means (apologies if this is obvious) it's completely free - you can download it and read it at your leisure without any pirating issues. How good is that?! It's called Foundational Principles of Task-Based Language Teaching by Martin East and it's a great mixture of theory and practice. I challenge you to read a chapter this week and use something you learn in your class.

OK - enough for today. Hope that you find something helpful here and I'll see you next week,

Best

Jo