Newsletter 2022#02

Good morning

What a wonderful ten-year anniversary week it's been! Thanks to all of you who took up the half-price offer on Teaching Grammar Communicatively - I've had some lovely feedback about it. If you haven't looked at this yet, today is the last day of the offer - check it out!

I've got a whole raft of stuff for you this week, kicking off with one of my Inspirational ELT Stories. If you've never heard of a 'Silver Gap Year' (I hadn't!) then you might be interested in Liz Warren's story here, proving again that it's never too late to do something different and interesting.

Something old

As I'm off to Australia (only about three weeks to go!), I thought that it would be topical to dust off a great classroom activity to practise articles in the context of geographical place names. These, as you know are a bit of a nightmare - the (River) Nile but Lake Geneva (no article) etc etc - arghh!  This lesson is low teacher prep, high learner output and will help to teach some of these anomalies. You could use it for a range of abilities, too (just include more rules for higher levels). Hope that you and your learners enjoy it.

Something new

A few weeks ago I got involved with a project to make a 'Human Glossary' of ELT terminology. I was asked to talk about Drilling. Well, I did this (details below) but it really got me fired up about the subject and my allotted two minutes turned out to be not nearly enough for what I wanted to say.  So, my new video for this week is rather longer than usual (15 mins) and it's called  'All you ever wanted to know about drilling but were afraid to ask'. There are some initial thoughts about the history of drilling and potential advantages and issues and some really practical ideas, too. See what you think (you might need to get a cup of tea/ coffee before you start watching)...

Something borrowed

I mentioned the Human Glossary project so I thought that you might like to see it. Mary, who's behind the idea, has a YouTube channel at Just Teach (Little Mary), where you can find the glossary so far (it's a work in progress and includes lots of great people) as well as other videos she's made with useful ideas for teaching. Check out this one with Ten ideas for speaking activities for online classes as an example.  If you're interested, this is the episode I was involved in and if you'd like to be involved in the project and make a two minute section of a video, you can contact her via her Facebook account Mai Mary

Right, that's it for me today. See you next Sunday and I hope you have a fantastic week.

Best

Jo