Getting the (Conference Speaker) Balance Right

There's been a lot of talk about this recently - getting the balance right. The balance between men and women, between native and non-native speakers at ELT events and conferences.  I've fairly recently joined the committee of an IATEFL SIG. I'm on the events team. So these kinds of 'balance' topics are more pertinent to …

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Who can help with my to-do list?

There seem to be a flurry of posts at the moment on how people are feeling, what they're thinking, what's going on in their lives. Maybe these posts are people sneakily trying to hit the record of 15 posts in a month set by Hana Ticha (See: #hanachallenge !). But people also often say that …

Academic Writing Skills & “Just in Time” Teaching

I've been looking back over my notes from IATEFL 2017 to find inspiration for another blog post. I'm a bit late now to just summarise talks, but I'd like to come back to one of the questions that was posed at a talk I attended. It was "Building bridges: the disciplines, the normative and the …

What library research skills training do EAP / undergrad students really need?

Colleagues and I have long since been aware of the lack of proper research and appropriate source use in our students' EAP and academic essays. We decided to offer a one-hour workshop on researching in the library at our university, and enlisted the help of an expert - the library representative for our subject area. We thought …

#ELTbehindthescenes of ClaresELTCompendium

Inspired by Joanna's post and and this post by Tekhnologic, who have started using the Twitter hashtag #ELTbehindthescenes, I thought I'd share a little bit of background on How I plan & write my blog posts I'm not a super prolific blogger, I have to admit. My posts appear rather sporadically. I started my blog …

Peer Presentation Feedback

I teach an EAP module which focusses on language and study skills. It's aimed at first-semester students starting an English Studies degree where English is a foreign language for almost all students. They're at the B2+ level. In a 15-week semester, we spend the first five weeks or so looking at what makes a good …

It’s boring only hearing from the same few students! – Encouraging Oral Participation

Recently, a colleague observed my grammar class. The 30 learners are B2-C1 level and the class is required for their degree programme (English Studies). I usually set up my gramamr classes so that the activities build on each other to move from re-capping basic points to more advanced fineties of certain structures, so we discuss answers …