Skip to main content

Introduction to this blog

The objective of this blog is to record real life situations in a TEFL classroom and to summarize successful and unsuccessful aspects of a particular class with addition of subsequent analyses. The name of the blog is "TEFL guinea pigs" because that's what I sometimes jokingly call my students when I give them a worksheet that I created or when I am trying out an original methodological approach. In this blog I will focus on language and methodology related topics and anything else that I might deem important for a successful English class. A little bit about me: I am a CELTA-certified English teacher with work experience in Russia, Ireland and Germany. I currently work and reside in Berlin.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Progress in a Foreign Language: Facing Your Own Pronunciation

 Progress in a foreign language — especially in speaking — can be greatly supported by recording voice messages and listening to them afterwards with attention and analysis. It sounds simple, but in reality, it is often uncomfortable. Personally, I don’t like recording my own voice and listening to it again. It creates a certain unease. There is something vulnerable about hearing yourself from the outside. The voice sounds different. The mistakes become more obvious. The illusion of fluency can suddenly disappear. And yet — it is extremely useful. If we truly want to become aware of our pronunciation, our rhythm, our intonation, and the mistakes we repeatedly make (especially those that may already be fossilized), then this step is almost necessary. It can be compared to training the body and observing progress in the mirror or in photographs. Without that mirror — without that external reflection — improvement would be very difficult. We would not clearly see where the weaknesses ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tourism Vocabulary/Modals of Deduction

The goal of today's lesson was to get the students familiar with a more sophisticated language of travel advertisements. They had to read a short advertisement on p. 69 (New Inside Out intermediate) and do the following exercises as their homework. I often try to set exercises from the student's book as homework because I prefer my students to read at home, especially longer texts. I prefer to assign the reading tasks from the student's book to the ones in the workbook because there isn't a key for them so they really have to make an effort. Also, as my Russian DOS taught me, reading longer texts is not very communicative and should be set as homework. This was a short text but since the language is quite sophisticated I thought it was apt for homework. The text did prove challenging for them. It contains words like: trawling nets, canopy (of trees), coral gardens, select community of travellers . To check the understanding of this vocabulary I created the worksheets wh...
Post a Comment
Read more

Anyway/Apparently/Actually

Recently I have posted my first worksheet on ISLCollective . For those who don't now it's an excellent site with TEFL resources where you can freely download but also share your original material. The worksheet that I created deals with differences between "anyway", "apparently" and "actually". I felt the urge to create this worksheet because these words appeared (among others) in a gap fill exercise in the book New Inside Out  intermediate( SB, p. 65, informal email). As a way of preteaching I decided to focus on these three adverbs which all begin with the same letter and are of similar length, which might make them difficult to differentiate for students at this level. I had found the sentences used in the exercise on the Internet and in some cases I have slightly altered them to make the gap-fill as unambiguous as possible. The worksheet has proved successful and the students didn't have problems doing the exercise after I had put a few...
Post a Comment
Read more