What is student engagement? When we teach, we need to make sure students are engaged. Some people think that this means that we need to...

Can you really teach English without knowing students' first language? When I tell people that I've taught English in ten different...

Some handy tips to help improve your timing when planning and teaching CELTA lessons

Should I be scared of teaching one-to-one? When a new teacher starts teaching, they sometimes get asked to teach English one-to-one and...

Teaching English is different from teaching maths or teaching geography because English is a language and this means that practising...

On a CELTA course, we spend a long time looking at what happens in the lesson itself. How do we get the meaning of a word across to our...

New teachers can sometimes cling to a plan, and there are good reasons for this. A lesson plan is your roadmap. The final stage of a...

By the end of a CELTA course, you should be very good at planning an individual lesson, but you might feel intimidated at the idea of...

In a dream world, every student in a class is exactly the same level - they all know the same words as each other, they are all equally...

New teachers can be intimidated by advanced students - "What if they know more about grammar than I do?" "What if they correct my...

For many new trainee teachers on their first CELTA course, one of the first and most frequent action points that they get told to work on...

Part of learning anything is to practise it. When I was a teenager and I learned to drive in Ireland in the 1990s, my father took me to...

When we meet people at the end of their CELTA courses, one of the comments they often make is that they didn't realise just how much time...

Reading and listening are known as the 'receptive skills' because we receive language while reading and listening. The other language...

Students all make mistakes, and it's important we respond to these. When students are speaking in class, and a teacher hears a mistake,...

One of the most important skills to learn as a new teacher is the skill of checking students' understanding. We might think we're...

Most grammar or vocabulary lessons on an English teaching course, be it an online CELTA course or a classroom CELTA, will start with some...

On a CELTA course, you'll be encouraged to get students to do most tasks by themselves, maybe working alone or in pairs or groups, and...

New teachers sometimes think that 'controlled practice' means 'boring practice'. It's true that controlled practice activities include...

Some CELTA tutors will avoid giving trainees writing lessons to teach, even though it is part of the syllabus. It is true that it's...