ELT365 · Day 173 — Unknown words while reading
When learners hit an unknown word, options are: guess from context, skip it if non-essential, or look it up. Teaching this triage stops one word from halting the whole text.
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ELT365 · Day 164 — Intensive reading: close attention on short text
Intensive reading focuses on a short passage — one paragraph, one exchange — with close attention to language. It is the opposite of skimming: slow, forensic, deliberate.
ELT365 · Day 163 — Scanning: reading to find one thing
Scanning is fast reading to locate specific information — a name, a date, a figure — without reading everything. The key is knowing exactly what to look for before you start.
ELT365 · Day 168 — Reading for specific information: scanning
Scanning means hunting a text for a particular item — a date, a name, a price — while ignoring everything else. The eyes move fast and non-linearly, the opposite of careful reading.
ELT365 · Day 161 — Why native speed confuses learners
Connected speech — assimilation, elision, linking, weak forms — makes native-speed English sound unlike the written form. Learners who know the words still cannot parse the stream.
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ELT365 · Day 204 — Paragraphing and organisation
A paragraph holds one main idea, often with a topic sentence and support. Teaching learners to plan paragraphs before writing prevents the wall-of-text that buries meaning.
ELT365 · Day 203 — Linking devices and discourse markers
Linkers (however, therefore, for example) and discourse markers signal how ideas relate — contrast, result, addition. Used well they guide the reader; overused they clog the text.
The Neurodivergent Writer’s Toolkit: What Actually Works (2026)
I am going to save you some time. Most "productivity tool" roundups are written by people with executive function who are trying to optimize. This one is written by someone with ADHD and bipolar disorder…
Generational Trauma Stops Here
My parents loved me, and they also hurt me. What generational trauma means to me, what the research on it does and does not show, and four concrete things I do so that it stops…
Five Languages, One Voice: Why I Never Felt Smart Enough
For most of my life I treated my languages as noise and proof of distraction. Undiagnosed ADHD turned my strengths into accusations; this is how I learnt to name them correctly.
The Forensic Auditor: How Documentation Became My Therapy
At some point during my dispute with a language teacher training institution, I stopped trying to win and started trying to document.
What Bipolar Taught Me That Every Productivity Guru Got Wrong
Every productivity system I tried made me worse. What bipolar disorder taught me about riding the high, the crash that follows, and why I now protect the rhythm before the output.
The Ship With a Broken Compass
I sailed for twenty years without knowing my compass was broken. On a childhood spent holding a family together, a late diagnosis in La Réunion, and why a navigator would call that an instrument check,…
On Starting Over: What Complex PTSD Taught Me About Resilience
Complex PTSD is not the same as PTSD. What the diagnosis means, what hypervigilance looked like inside my career, why starting over in La Réunion and teaching mattered, and why resilience, for me, has not…
Bipolar I at Work: A Practical Account of Professional Stability
Bipolar I is not about mood swings in the colloquial sense; it is about magnitude. A teacher’s first-hand account of what professional stability looks like, checked against NHS, NIMH, NICE and WHO guidance.
Teaching with ADHD: What My Neurodivergent Brain Taught Me About Learning
Diagnosed with ADHD in my late thirties, I learnt that attention is not binary. What that taught me about structure, openness and hyperfocus in the English classroom, and what the research says.
Bad Faith and the Language Learner: Why We Resist Speaking
“I’m just not a languages person.” Why Sartre would call that bad faith, what research says about aptitude and speaking anxiety, and what I do about it in the classroom.
The Stoic Teacher: Managing Outcomes You Cannot Control
Epictetus divided the world into what is up to us and what is not. What that distinction means for a teacher when a well-planned lesson falls flat, and a two-question ritual for before and after…