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.
Tag: ELT365
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.
ELT365 · Day 273 — Month 9 Review — Lesson Planning
A lesson plan is a thinking tool: it forces you to name what you want to achieve, anticipate problems, choose a framework, and sequence tasks from controlled to free.
ELT365 · Day 243 — Month 8 Review — Classroom Management
Classroom management is a system of small, purposeful decisions: room layout, timing, instructions, monitoring, and feedback — all chosen to maximise learner engagement and language use.
ELT365 · Day 205 — Speaking sub-skills — stress and intonation
Stress and intonation carry meaning in spoken English. A sentence stressed differently changes its meaning or politeness level. Teaching these explicitly improves both production and listening comprehension.
ELT365 · Day 201 — Linking words and discourse markers
Linking words (however, therefore, in addition) signal logical relationships between ideas. Discourse markers (right, anyway, so) organise speech. Both are often memorised incorrectly — learners need meaning, not just a word list.
ELT365 · Day 171 — Inference — reading between the lines
Inference is the ability to understand what a text implies but does not state. It draws on word choice, tone, context, and cultural knowledge. It is a higher-order skill often assessed at B2 and above.
ELT365 · Day 212 — Month 7 review — productive skills
This month covered the productive skills toolkit: fluency vs accuracy, information gaps, controlled and free practice, error correction strategies, speaking tasks, writing stages, and the four-stage lesson frame.
ELT365 · Day 211 — Staging a productive skills lesson end-to-end
A complete productive skills lesson has four stages: lead-in, model and analyse, prepare, produce, feedback. Rushing the prepare stage collapses the quality of production.
ELT365 · Day 210 — Integrating skills: the natural approach
Real communication always integrates skills. Reading sparks speaking; listening generates writing; speaking leads to reading. Design tasks that mirror this rather than isolating skills artificially.