Newsletter 2021#29

Good morning

Hope that this morning finds you as well as I am. Things are good on the digital nomad front (check out my Instagram feed for daily thoughts) and I have something very exciting brewing but I'm not quite ready to let it loose yet - I promise I'll tell you next week...

For this week, I've got a bit of variety - no particular theme, but hopefully something that will hit the mark for you.

Something old

Recently I trawled back through the archives to 2014 and a video I made on using roleplay in the language classroom. I think that I've got better at video making since then, but I still stand by the content and I think that there are some useful thoughts there. Roleplay seems to have gone a bit out of fashion in the English teaching world, but it's a really useful technique for all sorts of reasons and this video gives some pointers on how to make it work well for you and your learners.
 

Something new

My new video for this week was inspired by a fellow CELTA trainer, Sarah Findlay who shared a great input session on the really important skill of checking meaning. I thought it was very helpful so, with her permission, I've made a video about it here - not one but SEVEN ways to check meaning!  If you like this and you're a trainee or novice teacher wanting to learn more about it, you might be interested in my course Concept Checking Made Easy that will walk you through lots of examples to help you get the hang of this vital skill. There's a free unit to try on the site.

Something borrowed

Finally, I've spent most of my teaching career avoiding teaching younger learners to be perfectly honest and so never feel very comfortable dispensing any kind of advice about it, but I know great ideas when I see them and here are a whole bunch!  This is another of the free collections of articles from English Teaching professional (ETp), this time on the topic of Motivating Young Learners Online (this includes teenagers!).  Hope that you find something useful here (even if your teaching context isn't younger learners!)

That's it from me! Hope you have a good week and see you next Sunday.

Best

Jo