Category Archives: professional development

Teacher Confidence

I’ve worked on a few teacher development projects recently where one of the objectives has been to boost teachers’ confidence, both as speakers and teachers of English. For example, on the EfECT project in Myanmar, participants’ confidence in their English … Continue reading

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Teacher evaluation

Two new reports  on teacher evaluation were launched this week. The first is a global literature review of teacher evaluation, which examines different ways of evaluating teachers and makes recommendations for teacher evaluation in  ELT.  One interesting insight from this … Continue reading

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Why do teachers assess English the way they do?

I’ve been based in Slovenia for a few years now and regularly come across examples of how English is assessed in primary schools. I don’t know with empirical certainty how typical what I see is but I’m tempted to believe … Continue reading

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Teachers, Research and Methodology Textbooks

I’ve just returned from the ELTRIA conference at the University of Barcelona on the theme of bridging the gap between research and practice. Scott Thornbury spoke there about an interesting line of inquiry he has initiated looking into how methodology … Continue reading

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Long live grammar teaching (or ‘It ain’t over till the fat lady sings’)

In the last 20 years, repeated messages in the literature about communicative and task-based approaches, and the uptake of these approaches in contemporary coursebooks, may have created the impression that a ‘modern’ approach to grammar teaching is now a universal … Continue reading

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