Archive for 2015

BRELT Webinar

This Thursday December 10th, I will be doing a webinar for the good people of BRELT. You can find out more about it here on their website but if you don’t speak Portuguese here’s the abstract: If you’re the kind of teacher who goes to webinars, reads books, goes to conferences and generally tries to […]

Failure And How To Stop It Before It Happens

I think we need to talk about failure. If you teach adults, there’s a good chance you’re teaching a room full of people who have failed to learn English at some point in their lives. I should clarify that when I say failed, I don’t mean that they were a complete disaster, but they probably […]

TEFL Is An Iceberg – Reflections on CELTA and Standards

When I worked in Costa Rica, my school required teachers to be CELTA or equivalent qualified. They didn’t care where the person was from, whether they were local, a native speaker or a non-native speaker, as long as you had the qualification and experience, then you could work there. To my knowledge, it was the […]

Two Kinds Of People – A Getting To Know You Activity

As it’s the start of a new school year, I thought it was time to try out a new ‘getting to know you’ first lesson activity. I came across the website 2 Kinds Of People which simply and beautifully portrays how easily the people can be separated into different groups. I thought it was a fun way […]

What’s Talking For Then?

I’m an avid podcast listener and comedy fan, so the Comedian’s Comedian Podcast is one of my favourites. I find it fascinating to listen to comedians talk about their craft, and in one episode, the comedian Nick Doody was talking about his love for stand up and how it allowed him to talk about anything he […]

Greetings from Brasília

This is the first post I’ve written since I left San Jose, Costa Rica in July and moved to Brasília, Brazil. Inevitably I’ve been reflecting on my time in Costa Rica and I look back at it with nothing but warm memories. On a personal level, it was a great country to live in, and […]

A Letter To My Younger Self

This post is part of a blog challenge created by Joanna Malefaki in which we write a letter to our younger teaching selves. To read more posts in the challenge, click here. Hi James, So you’re just about to give your first lesson, armed with nothing more than a few pages of interview questions and […]

A Distraction of Collective Nouns

The best thing about living in Costa Rica is the nature. A narrow country with an Atlantic and a Caribbean coast, and a spine of volcanoes down the middle, it is host to an amazing array of natural habitats containing more biodiversity than North America and Europe combined. And my favourite aspect of that environment […]

Why Is ELT Politics Free?

On a recent trip back to the UK, I met up with an old friend of mine who works as a lecturer at a university training new primary school teachers. I asked him about learning styles and its place in the current training of teachers, and what struck me about the conversation was not so […]

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