National Geographic Learning: In Focus
Bringing the world to the classroom and the classroom to life
I want a house with a swimming pool. That’s what a friend said to me during my first week at college. It was my first understanding that we are all motivated by different things. And it’s as true of language learners as it is of mountain climbers, entrepreneurs or ex-smokers.
Teenage students have a famously short attention span, and with plenty of other distractions around them, you need to get them hooked as soon as they walk into the classroom. That’s why I often say that a lesson can be ‘won or lost’ in the first five minutes. In this
What’s the best level for introducing TED Talks? All levels, including beginners. Teachers and learners love TED Talks because they feature big, fascinating ideas that learners want to talk about. And with the right TED Talk, one that offers a big idea and the opportunity for students to learn and
If I told you that TED Talks started in the same year that one pound notes were taken out of circulation, Virgin Atlantic had its maiden flight, Michael Jackson released Thriller, and Ghostbusters, Gremlins and The Karate Kid were some of the year’s biggest films, what would you think? TED
Here’s a question for you. How often do you use the listening scripts in the back of the book for follow-up work or additional activities? Be honest! Now, I’m going to guess most of you are thinking ‘not often’, and you wouldn’t be alone. From my experience of doing countless
Nowadays most course books come with the reading texts available in Word format either online or on the teacher’s resource CD-ROM. These are a great resource, but from my experience teachers rarely take advantage of these, which is a shame as there’s so much you can do with them and,
Last week we looked at different easy to prepare grammar games, but when it comes to games vocabulary comes out king – there are literally hundreds of different vocabulary games out there. In this blog we’ll look at some of my favourites, but before we do that I want to
Many moons ago when I was learning French at school, our teacher always insisted on doing dictations. He absolutely loved them, and yes, you guessed it, we hated them. Apart from anything else they were boring and repetitive and we didn’t really see the point in them. So imagine my
Students love music, and they love doing songs in class. It’s small wonder then that coursebooks are incorporating songs or offering songs on supplementary photocopiable material. However, these are rarely the songs that students want to listen to. Students are far more motivated when the songs they do in class
Welcome to the first in our series of posts on activities for short courses – Ice-Breakers for the ELT Classroom! Join us over the coming weeks for posts on various activity ideas – from grammar games to projects and songs! It’s that time of year again when students are coming