The school I am teaching at has been using vocabulary books for years. They are organized thematically and offer word lists, translations into L1, short ecyclopedia-style texts where the words are used in and some gap filling activities. My colleagues seem to like them, but whenever I tried to use them in class I foundContinue reading “One Book to Bring Them All and Bind Them – making the case for vocabulary notebooks”
Author Archives: Mr_Schenk
More Wilderness – teaching introverted students
In an excellent and entertaining TED talk author Susan Cain gives insights into the world of introverted people. By using her own life as an example she talks about all the typical obstacles and hardships introverts have to overcome. Cain states that about 30%-50% of us count as introverts (other sources seem to confirm thisContinue reading “More Wilderness – teaching introverted students”
Dogme for Learners II – Things to Hold on to
One of the benefits of coursebooks is that they give students something to hold on to. Their linear structure might be flawed and will often obstruct meaningful conversation, but at least they give some sort of structure. And don’t be mistaken, students WANT structure, they NEED structure. As much as intelligent scaffolding is useful forContinue reading “Dogme for Learners II – Things to Hold on to”
Dogme for Learners I – Revising Revision
Teaching Dogme is a new way of teaching but learning Dogme is also a new way of learning. A rant about class tests The German school system has always believed in class tests as the Golden Egg of learning. School law sets a fixed number of them for every subject taught at school. My EnglishContinue reading “Dogme for Learners I – Revising Revision”
Silent Post-it Chats
How do you get a class of over 30 students to really communicate with each other in a way that involves everyone and doesn’t cause chaos in the confined space of a classroom? This clearly is one of the challenges I feel myself most often confronted with in my daily routine as an English teacher.Continue reading “Silent Post-it Chats”
They do care! – My thoughts on Dogme so far
During my last summer break preparing for the school year to come I got seriously infected by the idea of teaching Dogme ELT. Reading the magnificent blogs of Dale Coulter and Scott Thornbury was profundly inspiring. I had always felt sceptical about course books. In my experience they often are detrimental to communication and theirContinue reading “They do care! – My thoughts on Dogme so far”
The easiest speaking game in the world – one-word topics
I have been using Karenne Sylvesters fantastic speaking game for some time now and I just love it for its simplicity. Today I found a great list of one-word topics created by Jochen Lüders that seems just ready-made for the speaking game. So, two great things combined.