ELT365 · Day 185 — Drilling — why and how
Idea — A drill is a short, focused repetition practice used to establish pronunciation, form, or chunks in learners’ mouths. Choral drill first (whole class together),…
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ELT365 · Day 184 — Controlled practice vs free practice
Idea — Controlled practice limits what learners can say — substitution tables, gap-fills spoken aloud, sentence prompts — to build accuracy. Free practice removes those constraints.…
ReadELT365 · Day 183 — Accuracy vs fluency — the distinction
Idea — Accuracy means producing language correctly; fluency means producing it smoothly, without unnatural pause. Most learners have more of one than the other. Good lessons…
ReadELT365 · Day 182 — What productive skills are
Idea — Productive skills are speaking and writing — skills where meaning flows out. Learners encode messages in real time (speaking) or across drafts (writing). Both…
ReadELT365 · Day 181 — Month 6 review — receptive skills
Idea — This month covered: receptive skill types · top-down/bottom-up · gist and detail tasks · skimming and scanning · authentic vs graded texts · pre-teaching…
ReadELT365 · Day 180 — Receptive to productive — the bridge
Idea — A receptive task should not end with comprehension. The best lessons bridge to production: learners discuss, react, write, or apply what they have read…
ReadELT365 · Day 179 — Grading comprehension questions
Idea — Comprehension questions should move from easier to harder: gist first, then detail, then inference, then personal response. Scrambling this order adds unnecessary difficulty and…
ReadELT365 · Day 178 — Learner strategies for unknown words
Idea — Learners who encounter an unknown word have four options: guess from context, infer from word form, ignore it, or look it up. Teaching the…
ReadELT365 · Day 177 — Reading speed and fluency
Idea — Slow reading is often caused by word-by-word processing. Fluent readers chunk language: they process phrases, not individual words. Speed improves with volume and with…
ReadELT365 · Day 176 — The role of context in comprehension
Idea — Context — who is speaking, where, and why — dramatically reduces the linguistic work required to understand a message. Providing context before a listening…
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