Teaching & Learning English
The e-book below was put together by my Grade 6 English Language and Literature class as a warm up for our current unit Do you believe in magic? They are a very productive class – this work only took them half an hour, including the research 🙂
The British Empire was very big. At its peak, it included a quarter of the world’s population. What was it like for children who lived in the British Empire? This page shares some interesting facts about the terrible jobs children did in those days. The following pages are from Sir Tony Robinson’s book The … Read more
This post introduces a pedagogical approach I have been pioneering that might usefully contribute to discussions of transforming learning spaces to increase student ownership within the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom.
This article is the original version that I submitted for publication by the school. I edited the school publication significantly before it was published. Introduction Over the past five years, I have worked mostly with undergraduates and postgraduates in UK universities and high school students undertaking foundation year or IELTS preparation programmes in China. On … Read more
The teacher who made this website was interviewed about some of the components of the culture wheel. Click on the buttons below to open the audio files. Listen to his responses and make notes. His answers cover the time period 1980s to present.
Do you want to know about the mysterious man who organises children into a time-travelling team? Why does he ask children to do this work? Who are the bad guys in the story? Would you like to know about the machine that enables the children to move through time? You can hear about these things … Read more
This page is set up to help students explore the use of the BAWE corpus as a tool for informing vocabulary choices in academic writing. The examples below come from either common errors in student writing or questions my students have asked about specific lexicogrammar features of English. If you search for words or phrases … Read more
As part of an induction to a pre-sessional programme for postgraduates that I will be teaching on this summer, I attended a session with several academics from four different disciplinary areas (Education, Engineering, Management, Biological Sciences) to discuss the particular issues that their international students faced. This was very useful not only because it enables pre-sessional … Read more
As mentioned in my previous post, every so often during examining work, one comes across an odd phrase or expression that occurs too regularly for it to be dismissed as random or individual error. One such occurrence I have noticed today is the word revert being used where reply or respond would be the more orthodox (correct?) choice of … Read more
It is exam marking season again and I’ve been quite busy. Some seasons I notice a trend to comment on (for example the increasing use of relatable) and this is no exception – what is it with students adding the word what to a sentence where it is not needed? The two sentences below are … Read more
Marking student assignments can be a very interesting job. I often get to read about subjects that, left to my own initiative, it would never have occurred to me to think about. Sometimes the odd idea stands out as worthy of a quick Google search. This was one such idea… I was reading a report … Read more
