Idea — Receptive skills — reading and listening — are how learners take in language. They receive meaning without producing it. Both require active processing, not passive absorption. Example — A learner reads a news…
Idea — This month covered productive skills: fluency vs. accuracy, controlled and freer tasks, speaking feedback, the writing process, and integrating reading with writing. Example — Process writing = cyclical revision for improvement. Product writing…
Idea — In task-based learning, speaking emerges from the task, not from a pre-taught structure. Learners use whatever language they can to achieve a real goal. Example — ‘Plan a community event with a budget…
Idea — Creative writing builds vocabulary range, sentence variety, and risk-taking. Low-stakes tasks — poems, micro-fiction, dialogue — produce language learners own. Example — A six-word story forces lexical precision. A poem starter (‘I remember…’)…
Idea — Academic writing requires formal register, hedging, evidence-based claims, and explicit structure. Teaching it begins with register awareness, not essay format. Example — ‘It seems likely that…’ hedges. ‘The data suggests…’ is evidential. ‘This…
Idea — Cohesion is the grammatical and lexical links between sentences — pronouns, connectors, reference chains. Coherence is the logical progression of ideas. Both matter. Example — ‘She arrived late. Therefore, the meeting started without…
Idea — A clear paragraph has a topic sentence, supporting detail or evidence, and a concluding link. Teaching this explicitly helps learners at B1 and above. Example — ‘Social media causes anxiety. A 2023 study…
Idea — Reading models provide genre exemplars. Learners read to analyse, then write to replicate — analysis feeds production. Example — Read a film review: identify structure, stance markers, recommendation. Write a review of something…
Idea — A writing lesson has three stages: pre-writing (generate ideas, activate genre knowledge), writing (draft), and post-writing (feedback, revise). Skip one and quality drops. Example — Skipping pre-writing produces thin, poorly organised drafts. Skipping…
Idea — Correction in writing can be direct (give the form), indirect (mark the error), or metalinguistic (name the error type). Indirect is often more effective. Example — Underlining an error forces the learner to…