Practice Makes Perfect

Twenty Practical and Affordable Tips for Professional and Language Development for Freelance Teachers I’ve been teaching English in Rio de Janeiro for 17 years (wow, I feel O-L-D!) and I decided to work “solo” 6 years ago. Some freelance teachers might have a feeling they don’t belong to a community; after all, there isn’t a staffroom to hang around in for a chinwag or coffee, or no teachers’ or parents’ meetings – which can lead to lack of motivation for professional and language development (PD), right? Task-based Learning Special Interest Group There is no universally adopted definition of Task-based learning (TBL or, depending on its proponent’s sensibilities, TBLT, TBLL, or TBI). In its broadest sense, TBL refers to an approach to teaching and learning which views the completion of meaningful tasks through authentic communication as an effective way to improve language proficiency. These two adjectives, ‘authentic’ and ‘meaningful’ have entered the academic discourse of EFL instruction to the extent that they can sometimes appear to mean whatever the writer wishes them to. However it is important to remember the crucial methodological difference between authentic and meaningful approaches such as TBL and those adopted in many junior and high schools in Japan and many Asian EFL contexts. At the heart of TBL is the task. The task can take any number of forms, from simple purposeful discussions (for example: “Find out about your partner’s dreams for the future”) to more complex negotiation and logical reasoning activities.

5 Activities to Make Your PowerPoint More Engaging A few days ago on the Teaching English – British Council Facebook page there was a discussion about PowerPoint – Do you love it or hate it? The discussion linked to an article by Rob Lewis who talked about ways PowerPoint could be used in class. In an earlier post he also wrote about the good points and bad points of PowerPoint. I thought that it was an interesting discussion overall and I enjoyed reading other teachers’ opinions. Most people would agree that PowerPoint is just a tool and that the way you use it determines whether it is useful or not.

Moodle *Sorry, I can’t give you one – struggled enough to get there myself! :-p – but I can offer a few links that may be of help for exam revision purposes… The Delta module 1 exam is coming up in a few weeks – which means it’s nearly a year since I did mine! How time flies… For those who are less fortunate and have the exam looming large, this post is everything I have to offer on the topic of this (ahem!) well-loved exam: Beyond Methods – Kumaravadivelu – Being and Work The Parameter of Particularity The parameter of particularity requires that any language pedagogy, to be relevant, must be sensitive to a particular group of teachers teaching a particular group of learners pursuing a particular set of goals within a particular institutional context embedded in a particular sociocultural milieu. The parameter of particularity then is opposed to the notion that there can be an established method with a generic set of theoretical principles and a generic set of classroom practices. From a pedagogic point of view, then, particularity is at once a goal and a process. That is to say, one works for and through particularity at the same time.

Useful FCE websites Here are all of the useful websites I can find to help students preparing for the Cambridge First Certificate exam. Please let me know if there are any broken links, or if you find something you think I should add. General www.flo-joe.com/fce/ 10 Tools & Resources for Developing Writing Skills Over the last couple of months I've found and written about a number of really great tools and resources to help improve our students' writing skills. This is a collection of links to reviews of ten of the best. 1. Free Reading Passages and Progress Tracking Tools This site was designed to help grade K5 - K12 native speaker students develop their reading and comprehension skills, but can also be really useful for second language development. Students can choose from a range of graded texts and get a wide range of interactive activities and reading support.

The TEFL career path In this post, I’ll outline some of the courses you can choose from and provide some useful information about each so you can better choose the best options for you. TEFL training course (not the CELTA) You can find quite a few TEFL courses both online and in-house now. They have grown due to demand from people unable to attend or unaware of the CELTA.