All content by Mark is listed below:
I got my first teaching job in 1984, working at a large boy's secondary school in El Obeid, Sudan. This experience made it very clear to me that there's a lot more to teaching English than just being able to speak the language!
Friday - April 6th, 2012
In this activity, students get the chance to play Sherlock Holmes! They look at the evidence in a picture and try to work out what the owner of the bag did during the last few days. It's an enjoyable way to get some elementary level practice in using the simple past tense.
Monday - March 26th, 2012
Event date:
Friday, March 23, 2012 - 16:45
On March 23rd, 2012 we were interviewed by Frank Smith and Alison Hughes at Radio Exterior for Face to Face about Creative ways to teach English.
Sunday - March 25th, 2012
This picture story is from Pen Pictures 2. It helps students learn to structure their writing - each Part of the story corresponds to one 'step' in the classic narrative structure situation-problem-solution-conclusion.
Friday - March 23rd, 2012
Images could be described this way: "A picture is a text without words". This is what makes them invaluable for the language classroom. They provide rich and immediate content, but they leave it up to the student how to put that into words. They can't 'cut and paste' as they can from a text. It doesn't put words in their mouths.
Friday - March 23rd, 2012
This is a fun way to introduce the topic and vocabulary area of describing people. It is a sample activity from English Result Intermediate by Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald (Oxford University Press)
Thursday - March 22nd, 2012
Publication:
IATEFL Pronunciation SIG newsletter 'Speak Out'
These are a series of practical teaching ideas which I have been contibuting to the IATEFL Pron Sig magazine 'Speak Out'. They cover a range of different pronunciation issues:
1. Contrastive stress
2. The final -s suffix - plurals, present simple, possessives
3. Consonant sounds /t/ and /d/ at the ends of words
4. Dividing text into tone units
Thursday - March 22nd, 2012
This activity is based on a video about the first European settlers in the Magellan Strait. The video is used as a springboard for vocabulary work, and leads into an internet research activity in which students find out more about the events in the video.
Thursday - March 22nd, 2012
This activity is based on one of the lessons in our book Pen Pictures 3 (Oxford University Press). In this version, the picture story has been made into a video to help insipire the students before they do the writing task.
Tuesday - March 20th, 2012
Publication:
IATEFL young learners sig journal CATS, Spring 2000
Writing has a bad reputation in many schools, for both teachers and students. For the teacher, it means marking a pile of compositions and they are almost always worse than expected. For many students, writing is a boring chore and an “opportunity” to make a lot of mistakes.However, we believe that writing can be a very interesting and involving activity for students of English.
Monday - March 19th, 2012
This is an activity to raise students' awareness of the way words are modified in connected speech. In particular, it focuses on the way consonant sounds are linked, elided or assimilated.
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