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5 ways to check if a TEFL course is really what it says it is - Part 1
If you are looking for an English teaching qualification, but don’t know where to turn, you’re not alone. The TEFL industry is awash with

Tom Garside
May 11, 20204 min read


5 assumptions commonly made about 'NNEST's, and one way to win the native speakerism battle
If you are an English teacher whose first language is (shock, horror!) not English, you will probably have experienced some kind of

Tom Garside
May 8, 20207 min read


5 online teaching fails to avoid
More and more of us are working online, and the Internet is overflowing with questions from teachers about the best ways of doing this, and

Tom Garside
May 1, 20207 min read


Why teachers develop best in their own classrooms
If you are an English-medium teacher working in a school, international university or IB / GCSE programme, your classroom is your own

Tom Garside
Apr 20, 20204 min read


How to teach pronunciation 6: Find your rhythm with sentence stress
In this penultimate article about teaching pronunciation, we look at another suprasegmental pronunciation system which works across

Tom Garside
Feb 13, 20206 min read


How to teach pronunciation 5: Understanding and teaching word stress
In the next three articles in this series about pronunciation teaching, we will look at a tricky area of phonology which is often overlooked

Tom Garside
Jan 29, 20205 min read


How to teach pronunciation 4: What can the Phonemic Chart do for you (and your students)?
This article aims to show why the use of IPA is an essential tool for teaching and learning pronunciation, and that it is worth the effort

Tom Garside
Jan 4, 20206 min read


How to teach pronunciation 3: Accent and Identity
There is a trend in language centres to teach ESOL students how to speak ‘properly’, without an ‘accent’. The rise in the number of ‘accent

Tom Garside
Dec 19, 20193 min read


How to teach pronunciation 2: Drilling
Drilling, or the teacher-led ‘call and response’ activity which anyone who has learnt a second language remembers well, is probably the most

Tom Garside
Dec 4, 20194 min read


How to teach pronunciation Part 1: Phonics vs phonology
Pronunciation is an aspect of ESOL teaching which is often misunderstood. Clearly, pronunciation is an essential feature of students’ langua

Tom Garside
Nov 24, 20193 min read


Teaching Language Skills Pt 5: Writing skills and sub-skills
As a productive language skill, writing is much more than simply putting words on paper. A complex set of linguistic and cognitive processin

Tom Garside
Nov 11, 20195 min read


Teaching language skills Part 4: Listening skills and subskills
So much of what we mean is unspoken. The way we use cultural phrases, idioms and metaphor, the tone of voice, facial expression and emotion

Tom Garside
Oct 7, 20197 min read


Teaching language skills Part 3: Reading skills and subskills
Any written text is by definition intended for someone to read. The purpose of written language is to communicate ideas between people

Tom Garside
Sep 30, 20197 min read


Teaching language skills Part 2: Are your students speaking with their mouths or with their minds?
Speaking is central to use of language. Of all the skills we use when we learn, most describe proficiency in another language as speaking it

Tom Garside
Sep 23, 20198 min read
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