Now available in Advance Access in ELT Journal. May Pang recently wrote an interesting critique of my 2015 ELT Journal article ‘Affordance, learning opportunities and the lesson plan pro forma’. Pang’s piece in the current ELT Journal (‘Companion guides for lesson planning: a planning template and the lesson plan pro forma’) follows her earlier article…… Continue reading A fundamental dichotomy in ELT methodology: A response to Pang (forthcoming)
The most important animal in the world
Regular readers of my blog (both of them) will probably know a little about my interest in nature. Occasionally I find opportunities to bring this together with my passion for creating teaching materials. My Delta Download for this month, produced for Delta Publishing is an interesting jigsaw reading activity on what might just be the…… Continue reading The most important animal in the world
1-minute survey: CPD support on using the mother tongue to teach English
In preparation for a plenary talk I am giving at the Pharos University International ELT Symposium in Alexandria, Egypt on 3rd September, I’m doing a very quick (4-question) survey on support that teachers receive on the issue of L1 / mother tongue use in the classroom. It should only take 1 minute to complete. To…… Continue reading 1-minute survey: CPD support on using the mother tongue to teach English
The PPP saga ends
Having become known as ‘Mr PPP’ to some of my acquaintances, it is with mixed emotions that I finally conclude my work on this paradigm. I was never the world’s biggest fan, but given the shared mythology that has been disseminated within the TEFL community on PPP, I felt the research warranted, and it was. Just over…… Continue reading The PPP saga ends
Why practice makes perfect sense
For those interested in the PPP research I’ve been doing, my more academic paper on this topic has just come out, in the journal: English Language Teaching Education and Development (ELTED). See here for a link to the open access article. The full title is ‘Why practice makes perfect sense: The past, present and future…… Continue reading Why practice makes perfect sense
Teaching English in Africa wins ELTON award
On 2 June 2016, Teaching English in Africa (TEIA) won the British Council Elton award for Local Innovation, after being shortlisted earlier in the year along five other resources in the category including video and online resources, learner libraries, and large publishing companies such as Oxford University Press and Macmillan Education. It was up against…… Continue reading Teaching English in Africa wins ELTON award
Why PPP won’t (and shouldn’t) go away
In this talk, delivered at IATEFL Birmingham 2016 (slides available here) I investigate the origins, durability and validity of the PPP paradigm[1] in language teaching. Since the 1990s, when PPP was rejected by a large number of leading writers on (English) language teaching pedagogy (see, e.g., Willis & Willis 1996), a shared mythology about its…… Continue reading Why PPP won’t (and shouldn’t) go away
British Council Eltons 2016 – Nomination for Teaching English in Africa
I have just heard that my fourth book, Teaching English in Africa, (East African Educational Publishers, 2015) has made the final shortlist for the Elton 2016 awards in the category of Local Innovation. Great news for the book, and for everyone who worked so hard to help produce it. Many thanks to the content editor Dr…… Continue reading British Council Eltons 2016 – Nomination for Teaching English in Africa
You say TESOL and I say TESL, or TEFL, or… Is the English language teaching world a community with identity issues?
Given that the intended benefactors of all English language teaching are students, people who by definition are likely to have difficulty understanding such confusingly similar acronyms in English, it is ironic not only that we have so many of them in English language teaching (ELT), but that understandings of their meanings also vary significantly among…… Continue reading You say TESOL and I say TESL, or TEFL, or… Is the English language teaching world a community with identity issues?
How suitable are CELTA courses for non-native speaker teachers?
It’s fairly well-known in the ELT world that Cambridge CELTA and Trinity CertTESOL courses were initially designed with the needs of native speaker trainee teachers in mind at a time when ideas of what makes a good English language teacher were very different to what they are today. Back then (1960s-1980s), native speakers were automatically considered the experts…… Continue reading How suitable are CELTA courses for non-native speaker teachers?
Jason Anderson 