A Blog for IELTS and ESL Teachers
If you’re new to teaching IELTS, you might wonder how to write effective lesson plans. It can seem scary at first. IELTS students often have extremely high expectations and so there’s a lot of pressure on the teacher. However, planning a good…
I like teaching IELTS listening skills. It is usually much more fun than teaching reading or writing, and it’s easier than teaching speaking. At its most basic, the IELTS listening exam is a test of a student’s listening skills, and so you…
I started this blog long ago over at Blogger, under the name www.davidteaching.blogspot.com. Back then I was teaching IELTS, but it wasn’t really the focus of my teaching. My students just studied for IELTS a bit, and I was teaching them a…
I’ve been teaching ESL for 10 years and in that time you can’t imagine the ridiculous names I’ve encountered in my classes. In South Korea, every class had a Harry Potter or a David Beckham. There were countless Dragons and Kings and…
I work in China, where a typical university class consists of anywhere from thirty-five to sixty students. Most of the classes I’ve taught have about forty-five students in them, and that presents me with more than a few problems to overcome. Chief…
Happy New Year! In today’s post I will talk about advice for newbie ESL teachers. I’ll try and share a bit of the wisdom I’ve acquired in the last ten years doing this job. This is mostly intended for people teaching in…
New ESL teachers often find that one of the hardest parts of the job is managing the timing of a class. It’s a newbie’s worst nightmare to find they have run out of activities with five or ten minutes to go. This…
Hello Readers, It’s been a while since I last posted. As many of you know, I teach at a university here in Eastern China and that means I get a looooooooooong holiday! This year I went travelling through Europe and Thailand. I…
How do you get big classes to work well in groups? It’s a question that baffles many ESL teachers. Indeed, some classes are just going to be difficult, while others many act like angels. But there are some ways that you can…
This week I will begin to tackle some pronunciation problems my Chinese students have in learning English. I’ll just address the most common problems, and I’ll mention some of those below. In a future post, I will give some useful ways to…