Listening Post

Listening to English comes in many shapes and sizes for our learners: a teacher explaining an activity, a student listening to a guide on an excursion, watching a DVD or doing a test are just a few examples.

In this post, I’d like to focus on listening in the classic EFL sense as in an audio excerpt played in the classroom where the students have to listen and complete some kind of task.

There are various factors to consider when selecting a listening for a particular class, and some rules of thumb that I imagine most teachers usually apply.

Things to take into account include;

•    The length of the excerpt
•    The clarity of the excerpt
•    The speed of the delivery of the speakers
•    The subject matter
•    The type of communication (monologue / dialogue, etc.)
•    The strength of the accents
•    The nationality of the learners
•    The language level of the speakers

If we are using a coursebook then a lot of these factors have been decided for us i.e. low level books will have shorter, slower passages with the opposite being true of material from higher level equivalents.

It is only when we step away from our coursebooks and seek to source authentic material that more input is required from us as teachers.

The inexorable rise of YouTube provides a plethora of authentic listening material which can be both contemporary and fascinating and therefore extremely motivating for our learners. Hooray!

At the same time this material has, of course, not been edited for use in the language classroom. Clips that we would like to show to our students may be too long, be unintelligible, have long periods where nothing is said or indeed, no dialogue at all.

Upon finding a clip that contains too much information, I have a remedy that has so far proven successful. An example of this is this beautifully produced biography of Charles Dickens. My classes on the whole enjoy dipping their toes into literary waters and I knew this clip would be a perfect introduction to the life of one of England's finest writers. However, to expect a student to annotate the whole clip would be a big ask, while, at the same time, to miss any of it out would make the story of his life incoherent. 

So ...

I divided the class into groups of 4 and gave each of them a worksheet that focused on a single section of the clip. So student A focused on the first 40 seconds only, student B on the next 40 and so on. I informed the groups that they would be listening twice, after which they would reconstruct the story verbally at their tables. In doing this, I applied a certain amount of unspoken pressure on the students to perform, as all of them were dependent on one another for producing the complete story. I put the times the students had to listen to on each worksheet as well as the first and last words of their particular section. 

By tackling the listening like this students are also encouraged to help one another and, during the oral feedback, flesh out the details that one of their classmates may not have been too clear about. It also, of course, transforms a listening activity into an activity involving the 4 skills; listening, reading, writing and speaking. It’s a simple solution that I’ve used on numerous occasions when faced with a video I want to use that is too long or contains too much information. Do you do this? Are there any other workarounds to this problem that you know of?

Worksheet for Student A, with times and first and last words of the passage

If the pace of delivery is too fast, there is now the ability to slow the speed of the clip down on YouTube. Play the clip, click on the settings cog and then select either 0.5 or 0.25 from the Speed drop down bar. Obviously, slowing down the speed of the speech can make the clip sound rather weird, but it is something you may wish to try.

Slowing it down

As a footnote, I believe that there are times when we just need to relax and enjoy the classroom experience. After a period of time spent grappling with some of the more prickly aspects of English grammar (articles spring to mind!) it can be beneficial to allow the students to unwind with something less taxing. YouTube can be perfect for this, too. A YouTube clip that provides students with food for thought may not be particularly beneficial to them as language learners. It may not be beneficial to them as language learner at all, but, by providing them with a chance to relax for a few minutes and enjoy being in the classroom, certainly can’t do any harm. Indeed, by fostering a positive classroom atmosphere, learners who are generally reticent about academic life may come to look forward to learning (I did say may!). An example of a clip like this would be Where The Hell is Matt? or a relaxing music video information / karaoke sing-along worksheet. These kind of clips often produce a lot of classroom discussion, could lead on to further activities and leave our students with smiles on their faces.

Look! Matt is in Japan!

Paperback Writer Worksheet!

I'd love to hear about how you adapt YouTube videos (alternative sources of free video material are available - Videojug and Vimeo, to name just two!) to suit the needs of your learners. Any nifty ideas out there?

Getting ‘techy’

Following on from Dan’s ‘techy’ theme last week, I want to talk about my (often limited) approach to technology. As Philip, Head of the Executive Department at Hyland Language Centre, Madrid, will tell you, I am fairly (if not very) incompetent when things go wrong. After 7 years of comments such as ‘Philip, my mouse doesn’t work/is stuck’ or ‘My page has gone big/small/won’t print’, at least that is one part of his job that he no longer has to do! Dan now has to do this job, only now it’s usually ‘Dan, I can’t get the listening to work from the IWB’ or (more than once) ‘Dan, how do I get the video link onto the IWB?’

However, I AM interested in technology and where technology can take teachers. I have been lurking for a while (just looking at other people’s blogs, not commenting and not being brave enough to write my own). Now, I find myself contributing to this blog at Anglolang, which is interesting, challenging and, at times, even a bit scary!

It was Sandy Millin who (inadvertently) got me thinking about this particular post. I saw her interview

at Harrogate 2014 and was interested in her advice about blogging. Firstly, she said that you should write about what interests you and write a blog that you would be interested in reading. So true! The blogs I’ve enjoyed have a chatty style that I like and encourage me to reflect on my teaching without being too academic or difficult to follow. They are blogs I am happy to read on the bus / train home, not too taxing.

Keeping things simple!

Secondly, Sandy talked about staying simple and practical. Again, so true! Of the blogs I have written on this page, the most viewed (by a mile!) was one entitled Getting students to speak, which is the only one with a list of practical classroom activities.

Thirdly (and this is the one I am working on), hone your writing style. At times I think I have been too academic and, more often than not, I am not sure how a blog reads. I always ask Dan to read through what I have written and sometimes find that I haven’t expressed things in the way that I intended.

Starting and contributing to this blog has been interesting both in terms of having a forum on which to share ideas (and sometimes even to talk myself into or out of an idea which may not have been fully formed) and also in terms of the actual mechanics of setting up a blog (all very easy). I am an experienced teacher but this introduction to all things techy has been great for my own professional development.

Something else that Sandy talked about (and this

might have actually been on her blog. I didn’t write down the reference) was the importance of sharing and how her own blog had a huge number of hits after the British Council Teaching EnglishFacebook page shared it.

Anglolang’s  previous blog, which talked about IATEFL 2014 in Harrogate, received 100 times more hits than previous blogs because Sandy shared it on her blog (thank you!).  I think that this was the first time I had really understood the power of sharing and creating networks online. Something I would like to think more about.

Earlier I mentioned the importance of giving practical information in a blog so, in the interests of being practical, here are the sites that I have lurked on most frequently on over the years:

1.    Jamie Keddie -  http://lessonstream.org/ . This site, with its comprehensive lesson plans, has been a lifesaver during many a standby class! Looking forward to the new Videotelling site. http://jamiekeddie.com/project/videotelling/  

2.    Ceri Jones - http://cerij.wordpress.com/.  Ceri was my first DoS in Spain so this seemed like a good place to start. Thanks, Ceri, for lots of reflection in language most of us can understand!

3.     Ditto Sandy Millin. http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/ whose reflections have helped me to understand the possibilities surrounding technology.

4.    Sadly now no longer updated is http://sixthings.net/ .  I liked this because there were only ever 6 things – some were useful things for my classroom but others were just 6 things that made me laugh or random facts that I found interesting.

5.    Russell Stannard’s site http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/ which gives step-by-step training videos in various things technological.

I’m sure my thoughts will develop as I get further down the road of becoming more technological. I’d be really interested to hear if anyone else has had a similar experience / similar concerns.

Food for thought – IATEFL 2014

I was at the IATEFL conference in Harrogate almost 3 weeks’ ago now and I just wanted to share some of the ideas that came out of the conference, things that particularly struck me.

I was surprised that Michael Lewis’ book The Lexical Approach is now 20 years old. The idea of students learning vocabulary in context and becoming aware of fixed expressions in speech is still very much part of my teaching philosophy. Michael Hoey, in his plenary, talked about the importance of lexis, about how, if you store words as part of a combination (like black and white or get married to), being able to recall one part of this combination will help you recall the other. Language, as he said, is not about having grammatical frames into which we slot words but about having a bank of expressions into which we slot grammar.

However, I wonder if this idea has been translated into syllabi around the world. Many of the teachers who come on our teacher training courses complain of very fixed grammar-led syllabi, stating that they often ‘don’t have enough time for’ vocabulary or at least to look at vocabulary within the context of a text.

Michael Hoey also talked about the fact that there is no single language, just languages with a number of variables. Kathleen Graves, in her plenary the previous day, had shown a clip of a class in which the children were transferring phrases from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) into the standard English required for schooling. Therefore ‘he funny’ (accurate in  AAVE) was transferred to ‘he was funny’. Kathleen Graves talked about how AAVE is considered substandard – but is it? Or is it just a variety of English? And who decides what the standard is anyway?

This AAVE class was a perfect example of a teacher using their students as a resource and also of that teacher effectively preparing the students for a standardised test. Very inspiring.

Later in the day, I attended the Cambridge Signature Event about LOA (Learning Oriented Assessment) in which the message was about putting learning and learners back at the heart of assessment through individualised goals and purposeful language activities. LOA is a combination of formal exams and class-based tasks which are assessed and then provide the teacher with evidence of strengths and weaknesses which can then be fed into the next stage of the planning / learning process. Learners also give feedback on their own learning.

The idea here is that the end-of-course test is not the ‘be all and end all’, which seems logical to me. Assessment also provides future learning targets. However, as the speakers pointed out, LOA relies on the expertise of teachers (who are not necessarily assessment specialists) and also formalises a process which most teachers currently do intuitively (we all know who the stronger / less able students in our classes are). This will lead to a heavier workload in terms of paperwork.

Jane Spiro also raised an interesting point. She commented that what teachers believe is a good lesson might not correspond to what students believe. I think most teachers know this but it was good to think about it again. Jane also asked who should decide how students learn: the students or the teachers?  Here at Anglolang we have a negotiated syllabus, which means that the students have an important input into what goes on in the classroom. This is important: if students are engaged in their class, they will be more motivated to learn and participate.

This brings me back once again to Michael Hoey’s plenary. He talked about what students expect in a class and what the role of the teacher should be. The term ‘manager of learning opportunities’ is slightly long-winded but today’s teacher is not expected to know everything. They are supposed to facilitate learning.  For me, this also means making students aware of where they can go for more information or practice (self-study) and also helping them to develop better learning skills (learner training).

Michael Hoey also stated that ‘classrooms reflect the societies they come from’. Some cultures are less communicative than others and therefore some classrooms will also be less communicative. Food for thought. Especially when I am trying to get my xxx (substitute as appropriate) to be quiet and my xxxxx (again substitute!) to say anything at all!

Many of the sessions I attended were fairly theoretical so it was good to attend a couple of practical training sessions. Sandy Millin’s session focussing on how we can help students develop real-life listening skills and how we can help them ‘transition’ to real-life listening texts was excellent. I was reminded of Mark Hancock’s excellent website (and the word blender – have a look!) and the micro-dictations activity (in which the teacher reads one sentence at a time and asks the students to write it down). I was also encouraged to try different websites (www.elllo.org, where there is a HUGE range of listening material divided by topic, level and country; and www.ted.com, which I had heard of but have never used. There are a variety of talks on different topics. Some of them are fairly long so they would need to be adapted. Alternatively, students could listen to the talks at home.

Jamie Keddie’s workshop based around a sneezing baby panda video was also excellent. He was looking at using videos to tell stories, getting participants to guess what the story was about (and initially giving no indication that the video would be about pandas!) and then to predict what happened next before retelling. It was good to come away with some practical low preparation classroom material.

I really enjoyed the conference and it gave me a lot of things to think about. Do you have any thoughts about what I thought?(!)

A matter of choice!

To be able to choose is a wonderful thing. As a kid growing up in the UK, the choice of 'jelly or ice-cream?' at a friend's birthday party was just so tantalising (and a really tough decision, even though it's just a 50/50!)

I have endeavoured to take this idea of choice into the classroom and wherever possible let the students have a variety of options or a say in things.

In class, for example, I often write up a list of the activities that I am planning to cover in the lesson (e.g. discussion, vocabulary, reading, sentence completion) and then let the students decide which order they would like to cover them in. Of course, this is often not possible as lessons are built around a theme or involve a task and so the stages are rigid. However, when the opportunity arises, I let the students decide (they usually prefer to get what they consider the bad activities to be out of the way first!). It doesn't matter to me the order in which we approach these activities, but the students, I believe, are more motivated during the class because they know they have had a say in how it is run.

Another example is when we are going through the answers to, for example, a gap-fill exercise. I clearly remember at school being confident about all of the answers except for, say, number 5. The teacher would then proceed to ask me the answer to number 5 - I believe it's called sod's law! 
In an effort to avoid this I ask the students to answer any question they want. 'It doesn't have to be number 1, it can be number 5 or number 8, choose whichever you want!' Interestingly, the confident students always choose number one while less confident members of the class will pick numbers much lower down the order!

When giving homework I often ask the students to do, say, 8 of the 10 questions. Any 8, and I'll do the 2 they leave for them. The difference between answering 8 or 10 questions is minimal with regard to the learning process, but it empowers the students and helps to take some of the pressure off them.

Another idea is to have too many (!). What I mean is, rather than handing a student a newspaper article to read or a portrait to write about, the teacher has a surplus and the students are free to choose which one appeals to them. The difficulty here can be finding enough material but the internet is usually a great help.

I think that these small classroom differences motivate the students in a big way. The picture your student chooses becomes personal to them and therefore special. A student is far more likely to take pride and care over something that they feel positive about.

As a final example, I have asked my students to look through the series of pictures at The Guardian's Eyewitness photograph  series. Looking today, there are 1568 different images to choose from, so hopefully!! every student will find a picture that they like. I then ask them for a piece of writing based on the picture. It can be as many or as few words as they like (nobody has ever written less than around 60) and their writing can be in any form they want (on the board we brainstorm different types of writing e.g. letter, dialogue, diary entry, poem, news story etc.). The students never fail to complete the task and some of the work they have done has been exceptional.

Do you have other ways of letting your students choose?

p.s. My answer to jelly or ice-cream was always 'a little bit of both, please'. ;-)

Monolingual vs. Multilingual

I spent over 10 years teaching largely monolingual groups in Spain. The students were generally either university students or working professionals who wanted to learn English to improve their job prospects.

I have recently moved to Scarborough in the UK and now work with mainly multilingual groups. We currently have students from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Qatar, Spain, South Korea, Israel and Libya. We will have new students arriving in the next couple of weeks from Thailand, Italy and Portugal.

So, what have been the main differences between teaching monolingual students in their home country and teaching multilingual groups in the UK?

Firstly, English is the common language for students in multilingual classes. They need English to communicate with each other and with their teacher.

In Spain, I constantly found myself pointing to the classroom language chart on the wall as well as gently reminding students to speak in English. During error correction, I routinely asked my students to think about how much English they had spoken during the speaking task and often asked them to repeat the activity with a different partner… and speak more English.  I saw colleagues in Spain effectively use the ‘envelope of doom’ (an envelope passed to students who use too much Spanish. The student holding the envelope at the end of the class gets extra homework). With lower level classes, I was also very clear about when I expected them to use English (anything on the classroom language poster had to be expressed in English, for example) but I did allow some Spanish in the planning of a presentation if not in the presentation itself.  Having said all that, with all the students sharing the same mother tongue, it was much more difficult to motivate them to speak in English.

With multilingual groups, this is less of a problem (except when I have groups of students from the same country, at which point I go back to the techniques I used in Spain).  What I now have in my classes are students who generally speak English out of a need to communicate with each other. On a personal level, I do feel better about this than having to force my students to speak English!

Secondly, multilingual (and therefore multicultural) groups provide a natural information gap. Students can find out how their country is different from that of their classmates. This week in my upper-intermediate class, for example, we have talked about the age at which people learn to drive in different countries, important world events and how they were perceived in different countries (9/11, the Arab Spring and the death of Princess Diana, for example) and also the best beaches to visit around the world.  Many of these conversations were started by a student asking a question or commenting on something said by one of their classmates. I had to do very little. When I was teaching in Madrid, the information gap was often between me and the students. However, after ten years, it was wearing pretty thin and I often had to feign ignorance so that the students could practice their speaking!

Thirdly, it is strange not to understand the students’ mother tongue! I am not advocating teachers using L1. However, my knowledge of Spanish did help me understand why students were making certain mistakes (I am agree, for example, is a translation error) and therefore pick up on / correct the error quickly. Nowadays, however, I have to ask the students questions like ‘Do you have the present perfect / past perfect in your language?’ which are quite technical questions for many non-teachers.

Fourthly, monolingual students also share a culture and, as a teacher immersed Spanish culture, I fully understood the environment I was working in. Working with so many different nationalities, many of which I have never worked with before, I find myself unsure of where the limits are (‘will that idea / comment be offensive to…?’). I have also discovered that my own world knowledge (and I considered myself a seasoned traveller after working in Spain, Mexico, Kenya, Indonesia, France and Italy) is not as broad as I thought it was and that this world knowledge is massively Eurocentric. 

Finally, the students in my current classes in Scarborough are actually living in the UK and are therefore themselves fully immersed in the language and culture. They go home, talk to their host family, go to the cinema, watch TV, talk to each other, go shopping, get on trains and visit other cities. They pick up incidental language that is very difficult to ‘teach’ students in monolingual classes living in their own country. I know from living in Spain that I picked up Spanish expressions that I won’t find in any dictionary!

My students in Madrid generally came to class during their lunch break or after school / university / work. For many, the three hours of weekly classes was their ONLY exposure to English and therefore progress was much slower. I spent more time on reviewing material, on recycling vocabulary, on trying to encourage them to watch TV, read books, read an online newspaper.

Monolingual vs. multilingual is a HUGE topic which I have barely covered here. Does anyone else have any thoughts? It would be great to hear them.

Teaching Mixed Level Groups

Three students, beginner level – an easy class? 
In many ways, it is. I have plenty of time to give the students individual attention, they are making good progress (and have a good sense of their progress) and the lesson content is fun (lots of personalisation, spelling games, looking at numbers, talking about families). However, one of the students is a complete beginner (no numbers, letters or any of the classroom language that I need to teach the class in English). The other two are false beginners (and have all of the above).  I also don’t speak Arabic, the mother tongue of two of the students and so have no linguistic tools of my own to help. 

So, how did I manage my class of false beginner & real beginners? 

First of all, I established routines and now start every class with ‘What’s the date?’, ‘What time is it?’ and ‘What did you do at the weekend / yesterday?’ Yes, I am aware that we haven’t ‘reached’ the past tense or the time yet in the normal sequence of things but it is natural for me to ask all my students about their weekends / the day before and it is natural for them to want to share this information with me / other students. We treat this language as vocabulary and, while the false beginners are now able to give quite detailed information (I went to.. / I saw… / I ate… / I liked…), my complete beginner is still able to answer the question with a simple ‘I went to’.

Similarly, to end the class, I ask the students what they are going to do this evening / this weekend as well as tell them what their homework is. Slowly but surely, they are all building up a bank of useful expressions and, hopefully, when we come across ‘going to’ (as well as the past tense and the time) as a structure to be taught), the students will make the connection and feel more comfortable with the language. 

At Anglolang, we have a negotiated syllabus which lends itself well to this way of teaching.


Secondly, we did a basic matching exercise with classroom language followed by a worksheet in order to help the students communicate what they needed from me / each other in the classroom. Once again, by treating the language as vocabulary and encouraging the students to use the complete expression just expands their bank of language and helps with general communication despite the mixed levels.


Thirdly, we build on grammatical structures with differentiated vocabulary. For example, we looked at the structure ‘there is / are’ as an extension of classroom language. The students wanted to know how to say different items in the classroom (stapler / hole punch / folder / pencil case) and so we worked on producing the complete sentence - ‘there is a hole punch’. While the complete beginner student was working on this language (using a dictionary to check meaning, recording the vocabulary, writing complete sentences), the stronger students had moved onto the house (in the living room, there is a sofa / rug / an armchair). I simply provided the sentence frame ‘In the __________, there is a(n) ___________ ‘ 

Fourthly, we personalised a lot of the different activities: looking at maps (where are you from? Where is that? Can you show me?), asking questions about the students’ countries and about the UK. Hopefully, the students (and I) have learnt something about each other’s culture. I, for example, knew nothing about Riad and, while I knew it was hot, I didn't know that the temperature reaches 55 degrees in August!

Finally, I give the students time to work individually and to assimilate the information at their own speed. Four hours is a long time to be in class so I also try to incorporate ‘chat’ time with simple questions: ‘Is England different to Saudi Arabia / Italy?’, ‘How many brothers and sisters have you got?’ The answers may not be grammatically perfect but we do manage to understand each other and the students enjoy being able to talk about ‘real’ things. 

While I have been referring to a beginners’ class, I do feel that this blog could apply to any group of mixed ability students. My students are now working together in the same class and we have been able to take away the additional classroom support we initially offered the absolute beginner. Things are getting better. 

Do you have any other suggestions for dealing with mixed ability classes?

Dan's Favourite Warmer

As a follow up to my ‘throw the ball game’ blog entry, I thought I’d say a few words about my favourite warmer. It’s called (drum roll, please ...) ‘have a chat’.

It’s where I chat. With the students.

You could consider that this isn’t really an activity at all as such but rather just an insignificant start of a lesson. I would beg to differ!

The classroom is often not a place where real English conversation often takes place. We ask our students to do role plays and practise conversations that mirror the outside world but are not actually ‘real’ when they are doing them. 

We create false environments (at the post office, in a job interview, in a meeting etc.) so our students can practise safely within the confines of the classroom in preparation for the outside world. The informal chat that we conduct at the start of a lesson, ‘How are you?’ ‘How was the weekend?’ ‘Is your leg better?!’ etc. is one of the few times that we engage in real conversation. This;

•          Improves student confidence
•          Shows that the teacher cares about the student as an individual
•          Provides an opportunity for the students to improve / brush up their small talk skills
•          Provides an opportunity for the teacher to identify, for example, pronunciation and grammar weaknesses
•          Allows time for late comers to arrive and get settled
•          Is fun!

The irony of this activity is that we often feel compelled to end  the chat and get on with the lesson. ‘I’m not teaching, we must start soon!’ But by cutting the informal conversation short (which by now may be involving more members of the group and becoming increasingly animated) we move away from real communication. 

We then spend the next ten minutes setting up a completely false speaking environment ‘Ok everyone, I want you to imagine that you’re at the airport and you’ve lost your boarding card’ that can be less personalised and potentially less motivating.

I do, of course fully appreciate the need for role plays in the classroom and consider them an integral part of the English language learning process. And I know the conversation won’t always flow and that we shouldn’t force it, but I also believe that time spent ‘chatting’ is not time wasted and that we shouldn’t rush to finish it.

N.B. Students may also potentially feel that chatting is a waste of time and not ‘real learning’ so it might be worth summarising what has taken place before moving on, e.g. ‘Thanks everyone, that’s a great start to the lesson. We’ve already had the chance to practise our speaking and listening skills together and made a note of a few new words too.’

Chat’s all folks! (sorry!)

Dan

Ice Breakers & the Defence of an Old Classic

We do a lot of teacher training here at Anglolang (mainly teachers from the EU on Erasmus+ programmes) and I often start my first methodology session with a look at ice-breakers. 

These activities, of course, help the students to relax and allow them to find out a little about one another by communicating in English. When we brainstorm what methods the teachers use, the most popular activity by far is the ‘stand in a circle and throw the ball’ (not the catchiest of titles, I know!!) activity. 

Just in case you teach on Mars (!!) and are not familiar with it, here’s a quick summary.

On day 1 of a new class, the teacher asks the students to stand up and form a circle. Desks and chairs may need to be shifted or the class could always temporarily decamp. The ball is then thrown and (sometimes!) caught between students. The language element involved is, of course, up to the teacher and will depend on the perceived level of the class, but it normally includes some form of basic personal information. For example;

The teacher says their name and throws the ball to Student A. Student A says, ‘Hello teacher, I'm Amy. Nice to meet you!’ and throws the ball to student B. Student B catches (!) the ball and says ‘Hi Amy. It’s nice to meet you. I'm Abdullah’. And so on.
The possibilities for communicating are endless and could involve students’ ages, favourite things … anything!

What a great activity! The students are up and out of their seats and communicating together right from the start. Throwing and catching is endless fun (Even President Obama likes it!) and the students will barely even notice that they are using English – perfect!

I think that as we gain more classroom experience and find out about different ice-breakers, classics such as the example above can end up being left on the shelf. We perhaps see them as boring and ‘old hat’ and prefer a new idea we have learned about. But it’s important to remember that the students probably haven’t done this activity before and we shouldn't drop it just because we’re bored of it! The ‘stand in a circle and throw the ball’ game is great – cheap, cheerful & perfect for getting the students working together in English right from the start, so why not give the old classic a go next time you have a new class.

‘My name is Dan and I'm a teacher – catch!’

p.s. Choose a soft ‘friendly’ ball as you don’t want students leaving their first class looking as though they've been involved in a rugby match!

Dan

What we hope this blog will be (and what we we hope it won't be!)

By starting this blog we aim to, in the first instance, increase Anglolang's online presence. We are also beginning a second Facebook page exclusively for teachers, a Google+ account, a YouTube channel and a school intranet. Wish us luck!

At the same time we hope that this Another Angle blog becomes a place where both native and non-native teachers of English as a foreign language can come to share ideas & activities, chat about life in the language classroom and (hopefully!) share a laugh or two along the way.

We don't imagine this blog will be overly theoretical, but more a reflection of life at the chalk face, teaching English to students from around the world and all that it entails. Should be fun! 

Dan

Hello & Welcome!

Hello & welcome to the Anglolang blog!

Andrea Sweeney is on the left, our Academic Director and Dan Methven, Head of Online Learning, is on the right. Hi!