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

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...

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...

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...

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...

Every lesson is essentially a sequence of activities. Activities come in all shapes and sizes, but ideally, they are student-centred, and...

Students, even students who can speak, read and write well in English, often struggle with listening exercises in class, and there are...

Learning new words is one of the most important parts of learning a new language. You may be able to get your meaning across with poor...

Not all students are the same, but in most of the classes I've taught, when I've asked students what they want to do more of, speaking...