Taking Orders: Polite English for Restaurant Staff
My first job in Sydney was taking orders at a small Italian restaurant in Strathfield. I was so nervous. I kept writing the wrong thing. One evening a chef said to me: 'Repeat the order…
Tag: celta
Taste in Words: Describing Wine Like a Sommelier
At Uccello in Sydney, I once described a Barossa Shiraz to a table of eight. I used three adjectives — smoky, full-bodied, long finish — and the table ordered a second bottle. Language sold the…
Coffee Talk: Vocabulary from Behind the Espresso Machine
My first week at a Sydney café, a customer asked for a 'flat white'. I nodded. Then I stared at the machine for a full minute with no idea what to do. The other barista…
5-Min Pro · How to Plan a 45-Minute Lesson from Scratch
The idea — A lesson without a plan is a sequence of activities. A plan answers: what will learners be better able to do at the end? Everything else — tasks, stages, timing — serves…
ELT365 · Day 181 — Month 6 Review — 30 Ideas for Your Next Receptive Skills Lesson
Thirty days, thirty tools. Choose three you haven’t used yet: a prediction task, a transcript comparison, or an extensive reading experiment outside class.
ELT365 · Day 169 — Scanning: Finding the One Fact You Need
Scanning means moving over a text quickly to find one specific piece of information. The reader isn’t reading; they’re searching. Eyes move, brain filters.
ELT365 · Day 156 — Listening for Detail: When Every Word Counts
Detailed listening means attending to specific information: a number, a name, a date, an exact instruction. Use it after gist work, not instead of it.
ELT365 · Day 154 — Bottom-Up Processing: Decoding the Signal
Bottom-up processing starts with the signal — letters, phonemes, words — and builds up to meaning. It is essential when context is unclear or vocabulary is unknown. Three classroom demonstrations make the processing load visible.
Building My Own Job Lead Automation System (and Why It Was Harder Than I Expected)
For the past few weeks, I've been building a system to automatically find English teaching and training opportunities in France using the official France Travail API. As someone based in La Réunion managing ADHD, bipolar,…
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