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An ELT Glossary : Method, Approach and Eclecticism
During my TEFL career, I was once part of a team employed to "convert" a school which used the Direct Method to one which would use the Communicative Approach. Why the difference in terms? What...
View ArticleAn ELT Glossary : Optative Mood
Optative sentences are those where the speaker/writer makes a wish of some sort. In English there is no specific grammatical form for optative mood, though there is in some other languages such as...
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A Christmas Activity
Note : If you're looking for a Christmas activity to use nearer to the holidays, or with adults, try here for lower level and here for higher level studentsIf you teach children, you probably want to...
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Reading Aloud
In the last thirty years, reading aloud has fallen out of general favour as a way of improving language proficiency. Arguments against it centre around the fact that it is a skill in its own right, not...
View ArticleAn ELT Glossary : Premodification / Postmodification
Modifiers are words or phrases that in some way influence the meaning of another word or phrase. They may come before the word - in which case the are known as pre-modifiers - or after it - when they...
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Christmas Quiz
Looking for a "last lesson before Christmas" activity to use with your adult or teenage students? Try our Christmas quiz - which then turns into a webquest and presentation. Here are some questions...
View ArticleAn ELT Glossary : Reflexive pronouns
A reflexive pronoun is one that refers back to another noun, usually the subject of the verb : myself, yourself, himself, herself, oneself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, and themselves. They are...
View ArticleAn ELT Glossary : Comma Splice
This sentence is incorrectly punctuated, it is an example of a comma splice.In English, two main clausescannot be separated in writing by a comma only - as in the example above. There must be a...
View ArticleAn ELT Glossary : Fresh Starts
Fresh starts are a feature of a test that can make the results more reliable. A test with fresh starts will be divided into a number of sections, each testing a different area of language or...
View ArticleTeaching Reading - Part Two
As promised, this week's extract from our Delta Modules courses follows on from last week's post. It's the second part of a unit form Module One dealing with teaching reading. The video (approx 10...
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Teaching Receptive Skills
For the past few weeks, we've been looking at extracts from our Delta Module One course on teaching receptive skills. Now we'll continue the topic with a sneak peek at a Delta Module Two seminar. We...
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A Subskills Approach to Teaching Listening and Reading
Did you watch the first part of the Delta Module Two seminar that we posted last week? In it I argued that the common pre- while and post- approach to listening and reading was a useful, but not...
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An ELT Glossary : Discrete Item and Integrative Tests, Direct and Indirect...
Discrete item (or discrete point) tests are tests which test one element of language at a time. For example, the following multiple choice item tests only the learner's knowledge of the correct past...
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So how much do you really know about TEFL??
This week's extract from our Delta Modules courses isn't the usual presentation, but a quiz - to help you diagnose what you do and don't know about TEFL. It's built into our Module One course, to help...
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An Easter Game
Looking for an Easter activity to do with your children’s classes? Try an Easter Egg Hunt and revise colours and numbers at the same time.If necessary, check that the children remember the names of the...
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Seeing yourself as others see you ...
I was once Director of Studies for a large language school, and one of the parts of the job that I liked least was that if students complained about anything, it was up to me to sort it out. One day in...
View ArticleDELTA Special - How is COVID affecting the June 2020 session for the three...
As with all other Cambridge exams, COVID-19 is causing problems and postponements for all three Delta Modules. Information is changing as the situation develops but I am checking the Cambridge website...
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One to One : Content and Methodology
Teachers are often justifiably nervous about taking on a one-to-one lesson. There is the feeling that it should be somehow “different” from a group lesson, and the fear that it will be much more...
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Task Repetition
Since the 1990s, the benefits of task repetition have been fairly widely discussed. However, they are generally limited to the discussion of the repetition of "tasks"in the technical sense of the term...
View ArticleAssonance, Alliteration and Consonance
Assonance, alliteration and consonance are all rhetorical devices, found primarily in literary writing, but also in other genres such as advertisements and promotional text, political speeches and...
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