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He said, she said… How to teach reported speech effectively
The structure and meaning of reported speech in English is notoriously difficult to teach. Teacher training courses such as the Trinity Cert

Tom Garside
Mar 15, 20234 min read


Pronunciation, Phonology, Phonics? What’s the difference?
Pronunciation is a fundamental part of speaking for second-language learners of English. A learner can have accurate spoken grammar, a wide

Tom Garside
Mar 6, 20233 min read


One teaching question, 3 Chat GPT responses
With the buzz around ‘scary good’ ChatGPT and its benefits for teachers and students, I thought I’d give it a quick test and see what it

Tom Garside
Feb 28, 20237 min read


TESOL Teaching mistakes to Avoid 7: Explaining language aids understanding
Ask many English language teachers what they find challenging about the job, and they will tell you that a lot of English grammar and vocab

Tom Garside
Feb 16, 20234 min read


TESOL Teaching mistakes to Avoid 6: ‘Correct’ answers are enough
In most school subjects, performance can be assessed by how much information has been retained by a student, as demonstrated in a test

Tom Garside
Feb 8, 20234 min read


TESOL Teaching mistakes to Avoid 5: ‘Now listen to the recording’ is a listening task
There are many reasons for using audio recordings and reading texts in the language classroom. Listening and reading are major language

Tom Garside
Feb 5, 20235 min read


TESOL Teaching mistakes to Avoid 4: The more you teach, the more students learn
In this series of articles, we are looking at some common teaching actions which more often than not simply don’t work. If you find yourself

Tom Garside
Jan 30, 20233 min read


TESOL teaching mistakes to avoid 3: Drilling to teach meaning
In this series of articles, we are looking at some common teaching actions which more often than not simply don’t work. If you find yourself

Tom Garside
Jan 23, 20233 min read


TESOL teaching mistakes to avoid 2: Asking students to read texts out loud.
In this series of articles, we are looking at some common teaching actions which more often than not simply don’t work. If you find yourself

Tom Garside
Jan 16, 20234 min read


TESOL teaching mistakes to avoid 1: Asking 'what does this word mean?'
In this series of articles, we look at some common teaching actions which more often than not simply don’t work. If you find yourself doing

Tom Garside
Jan 13, 20235 min read


Trinity CertPT graduate Julie Chen interview
We're proud of all our graduates, each one is a success story of their own. We know how hard you all worked, so we were delighted when our

Tom Garside
Jan 12, 20233 min read


Word by word: An adaptable activity to teach word order and sentence grammar
So much of a teacher’s time is spent either correcting errors or working on the smallest parts of English grammar: prepositions, articles

Tom Garside
Dec 13, 20224 min read


3 activities to help learners use the passive voice correctly
The passive voice is an important structure for intermediate learners of English to get to grips with. Being a voice (rather than a tense),

Tom Garside
Dec 2, 20224 min read


From the UK to Hong Kong - What the Language Point Trinity CertTESOL has done for me
When my work as a photographer dried up during the pandemic, in 2021, I took the opportunity to complete the Trinity CertTESOL with Language

Tom Garside
Nov 25, 20221 min read


Implementing Multiple Intelligences in the language classroom
Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory aims to reach the widest range of intelligence spectrums in learners. By stimulating the different intell

Tom Garside
Nov 24, 20223 min read


A Multiple Intelligences approach to teaching.
Howard Gardner was something of a left-field thinker who took a long hard look at public schools in the US and Canada, and noticed something

Tom Garside
Nov 17, 20223 min read


What is Bloom’s taxonomy and why does it still matter?
In 1956, the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom published a wide-ranging theory of learning, which was split into three domains: the

Tom Garside
Nov 12, 20223 min read


How to use the International Phonetic Alphabet 2 - Awareness-raising
the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can be a tricky thing for teachers to get familiar with. However, it does provide a valuable resou

Tom Garside
Nov 8, 20224 min read


How to use the International Phonetic Alphabet 1 - Transcribing speech
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an essential tool in teaching pronunciation. Drilling words and phrases one by one can teach

Tom Garside
Oct 30, 20225 min read


4 ways to adapt teaching materials for your students
If you follow a curriculum with your students, the content that you teach is likely not to be the best match for everyone in the class. Text

Tom Garside
Oct 23, 20225 min read
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