Category: ELT Newsletter

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036] Implications for teaching Three core issues need to be addressed in planning speaking activities for an English class. The first is to determine what kinds of speaking skills the class will focus on. Is it all three of the genres described in the preceding… Continue reading Teaching speaking – Teaching talk as interaction (Cambridge Conversations)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036] In a previous post I explained some of the reasons why we should focus on bottom-up strategies for listening and reading. In this post, I’d like to show how this might work in practice for the skill of listening. Even learners who have a… Continue reading Bottom-up decoding: listening (OUP ELT Blog)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036] English grammar has been closely bound up with that of Latin since the 16th century, when English first began to be taught in schools. Given that grammatical instruction prior to this had focused on Latin, it’s not surprising that teachers based their grammars of… Continue reading How English became English – and not Latin (OUP Blog)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 6 | February 15, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]   We know even less about the origin of idioms than about the origin of individual words. This is natural: words have tangible components: roots, suffixes, consonants, vowels, and so forth, while idioms spring from customs, rites, and general experience. Yet both are apt… Continue reading Between language and folklore: “To hang out the broom” (OUP Blog)