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Teaching Tips

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

ChatGPT and Writing

  I started paying attention to chatter about artificial intelligence and writing late last year. I was reading a post about it by a blogger I follow. It turned out, he’d had ChatGPT write his column for him and, at the end, said something like, “the software wrote all the material ‘above’ for me. Isn’t it great?” Umm, no. It wasn’t. I’m not going to...

Mind-mapping makes writing easier

When you sit down to write an essay, a story or other piece of work, one of two problems often occurs: (1) You have dozens of ideas competing for your attention and you don’t know where to begin. Thoughts flicker through your mind and disappear. Zip – they’re gone! You’re like a child at the circus – so many lovely, colourful things are competing for...

Developing Writing Skills

The developing of the language skills has always been a very hard and interesting task. The process of writing suggests that we can actually teach students how to write with coherence, an appropiate grammar structure and an acceptable spelling. One of the effective ways to do this is to motivate the students and make them aware of the steps involved in...

How do you teach writing? Reflections on teaching practices

Have you ever asked your students how they feel about writing? Have you ever received responses such as ‘Writing is difficult’ or ‘Writing is boring”? In my experience, such responses are quite common and they got me thinking about why students might feel this way. Text By Maria Stefanidou, EFL Teacher, BA, CELTA, Delta Indeed, the ability to write in a...

Providing Corrective Feedback in EFL Writing

Error treatment is one of the key issues in EFL writing faced by both teachers and researchers. When reviewing their learners’ texts, EFL teachers tend to provide feedback on several areas of the target language. The type of feedback that is relevant to linguistic errors is very often referred to as corrective feedback or error correction. The aim of the...

The Cognitive Aspects of Writing

Paragraphing: It is important to avoid too much eye strain. A piece of writing has to be interesting to attract the reader to new pieces of information. A good paragraph is achieved when a topic sentence is intelligently chosen; the knowledge of choosing a good topic sentence for each paragraph helps students arrange the sequence of their information in...

B1 writing with a twist

B1 level is considered to be the ladder from the elementary levels to upper- intermediate ones. Learners become more independent, more fluent speakers and they are at the stage in which they have to revise and improve their English skills and to be more proficient users of the language. Among these, the most important feature of this level (or age to be...

L1 interference in Writing

  Sometimes, even at Proficiency level, L1 interference - the influence of the Greek way of thinking in the way we express ourselves in another language - is natural and inevitable. A lot of untrained learners tend to naively translate into English word for word more or less, the results of which can be disastrous, if not ridiculous and...

Writing here, writing there ...

Text is the very stuff of teaching. It is right there at the core of what we do. Written text is something we can move onto a wide range of surfaces and objects to increase entertainment and engagement for our young learner – and even teenage – students. I refer to this as text shift. Here, I would like to show you some examples.   By Chris...