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N is for Not interfering
In 1966, Leonard Newmark wrote a prescient article called How not to interfere with language learning. For various reasons, the notion of not interfering has come back to me repeatedly over the last...
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F is for Focus-on-form (2)
Is dogme soft on form? It’s a central tenet of the dogme approach to language instruction that, as we put it in Teaching Unplugged, it’s all “about teaching that focuses on emergent language” (Meddings...
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O is for Ownership
Can you own an idea? In the lastest issue of Voices, the IATEFL newsletter, in a page of teaching ideas, there appears the following activity: Holiday photos 1.Teacher borrows a notepad from a student...
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J is for Jargon
A student on my MA TESOL course posed the following question last week: “Before becoming a teacher OF teachers, how much did you find yourself grappling with jargon specific to the discipline when...
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T is for Task-based Learning
I’m off to this conference next week, where I’ll be attempting to situate Dogme/ Teaching Unplugged within the wider orbit of task-based language teaching (TBLT). To tell the truth, I find the thought...
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G is for Gist
A couple of weeks ago Patrick Huang, a teacher trainer in Toronto, wrote to me: I was hoping you could help with this notion of ‘gist’ tasks, which I’ve always thought as helpful in the ESL classroom....
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A is for Approach
A copious amount of blog ink (blink?) has been expended in the last week or so, arguing the toss as to whether – among other things – Dogme is an approach. In Neil McMahon’s blog, for example, he asks...
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S is for Silence
In Teaching Unplugged (Meddings and Thornbury, 2009) we have an activity called ‘The Sounds of Silence’, whereby the class simply listen in silence for one minute to whatever’s going on around them...
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V is for Vocabulary teaching
A teacher educator in Norway reports on how she has used ideas from my book How to Teach Vocabulary (2002) on an in-service course for local primary and lower secondary school teachers. Mona Flognfeldt...
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R is for (Wilga) Rivers
I’m working on a book chapter about methodology texts, and the name Wilga Rivers comes up again and again. You may remember that she is the first woman to get a mention in Stern’s (1983) chronology of...
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