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Teaching Tips

Teaching Tips and Tricks. Keep up the learning and engagement with these helpful classroom teaching tips

How to start a writing assignment

Writing takes time Find out when the assignment is due and devise a plan of action. This may seem obvious and irrelevant to the writing process, but it’s not. Writing is a process, not merely a product. Even the best professional writers don’t just sit down at a computer, write, and call it a day. The quality of your writing will reflect the time and...

How to improve our students’ exam results in ESB writing

How often have we been cornered by an irate parent wanting to know why his child failed the writing part of the exam even though they did very well during the year in the compositions they wrote? The student in question may have passed the exam overall, but the dreaded word ‘fail’ will be the focus of the parent’s concern.    So, how do the examiners...

Speaking your mind?

  “I don’t mind talking to you or my classmates in English; in fact, I quite enjoy it. But it’s different when I have to have a conversation with a stranger whose job is to look for mistakes in what I say and how I say it – the examiner is not there to support me, but to judge me. And they’re not interested in talking to me, they just want to do their...

Thoughts on Preparing Candidates for the Cambridge English Exams Speaking and Writing Papers

  I am often asked by teachers given the proximity of exam day what the right balance between exam practice and general language and skills development work should be. What I suspect lies behind this question is that teachers know that learners will keenly set about anything in this period given an exam practice label – keen as they are to see how close...

Assessing Speaking

In practice, we often use the words test and assessment interchangeably. But they do have slightly different meanings. Students need to know what is expected from them, how they can best prepare for any assessment, what counts and what does not count, and how they’re going to be assessed. And this also gives them an opportunity to learn how they are making...

Teaching Speaking at B2 Level

Teaching SpeakingIt has been argued – with good reason one might add – that of all four skills involved in foreign language learning, the hardest to achieve yet the most rewarding is speaking the language in question. Being an FL student myself this year, taking my B2 exams in Spanish shortly, I’ve put my self in my students’ shoes and gained some empathy as to why the...

Setting Achievable Goals for our EFL Writing Class

“Scaffolding” describes a performance enhancement procedure which can make teaching composition meaningful and support learners. However, despite teachers’ and students’ good efforts, EFL composition writing still remains a very demanding task which more often than not surrounds a great deal of disappointment and frustration. The crucial question “Is...