When we think about improving our students’ speaking skills, we often turn to discussions, role plays, presentations, or pair work. For listening, we usually use comprehension questions, gap-fills, or note-taking tasks (I’ve written before about my own struggles with prioritising listening). But what if there were an activity that could strengthen both listening and speaking…
When we teach writing, we often turn to coursebooks, exam criteria, and academic writing frameworks. They all have their place. But some of the most practical writing techniques don’t come from ELT methodology books at all. They come from writers. Novelists, journalists, essayists, and writing teachers have spent decades thinking about what makes writing engaging,…
AI lesson planning is everywhere now The biggest threat AI poses to language teaching isn’t that it will replace teachers; it’s that it will make us lazy consumers rather than creative lesson-designers. With institutional platforms offering “one-click” AI lesson planning, worksheet generators, rubrics, and feedback loops, it is incredibly easy to let the machine do…
Tiny stories are a simple way to give A1-A2 learners something real to say. As language teachers, we know very well that one of the most difficult things is to find engaging, meaningful and real-life practice material for lower level classes. While planning a speaking lesson for my students, I thought about the following idea….
When ChatGPT entered our lives, I was reluctant to start using it. I had concerns about many things. Lots of people in education were asking, “Will AI replace teachers?” Mine wasn’t that question — it was more about privacy, how to teach its use to large groups, and how it might be misused. Then, as…
I Wrote These Teacher Wellbeing Tips in 2013. I Still Believe Every One of Them. Recently, while tidying up some old files after moving my blog from Edublogs to WordPress, I came across a list I wrote back in 2013: ten simple self-care tips for teachers. A lot has changed since then. We experienced the…
TeacherForge is an AI tool I recently added to my EFL toolkit — and here’s why it caught my attention. You may want to ask what’s the use of other AI Tools as long as we have ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. They can generate the reading text, the questions, the vocabulary exercise, they can help…
In the first post of this series, I talked about warm-ups and lead-ins. Now it is time to move into the heart of grammar teaching. Here we may ask ourselves a question to start: How should we teach grammar? As a matter of fact, there is no single correct answer. It depends on the context of your…
Songs in My Life When it comes to using songs as language lessons, I always start with a belief: Music is one of the most important things in my life. I walk to work with music in my ears and go back home carrying it with me. I cook to the songs I love and,…
Beyond the Jar and Into AI The Fast Finisher Problem We all know that moment. The task is still on the board. Most of the class is working. And there, a student sits looking around, waiting or doodling or whispering to a neighbour and you think “I should be doing something more for them.” This…
Creative Activities in Busy ELT Classrooms: From Coursebook Images to Classroom Interaction As you know, this year in March, I attended TESOL Spain 49th Annual National Convention and now I’m delighted to share that my article “Creative Activities in Busy ELT Classrooms: From Coursebook Images to Classroom Interaction” has been published in the TESOL-SPAIN ELT…
An experiment with me, myself and Generative AI for Teaching AI Literacy: Part 2 Checking with AI After publishing the first part of this experiment, I became curious about something. The original aim was actually quite simple. I thought that AI-generated writing would contain certain clues that would reveal itself. We often hear people say,…
