Teacher as Researcher: The Ultimate Professional Development (Edutopia)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 4 | January 27, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

Teacher researchers pause each morning as they walk into their classrooms and ask, “What will my students teach me today?” To answer that question, they listen to and watch their students engage in authentic work; collect work samples, photographs, and transcripts to document what their students say and do; and use that information to evolve their practice as they celebrate and support the voices and experiences of the children they teach. In this sense, teacher researchers are innovators, curriculum drivers, agents of school change, and directors of their own professional development.

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Young Learners and Grammar: How to Do It Right (BusyTeacher)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 4 | January 27, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

Of all the things we teach, most would agree grammar is one of the most challenging.

The reason is because it is not easy to motivate students, especially young students to learn grammar . Simply sitting kids down and explaining rules is not an option because they possess certain characteristics that make their learning different from that of adults. In an ESL classroom, kids are in a setting in which they are surrounded by language. The second language is made meaningful because of the context and because of the way teachers speak to them.

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Teaching listening – Listening as Acquisition (Cambridge Conversations)

[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 4 | January 27, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

Our discussion so far has dealt with one perspective on listening, namely, listening as comprehension. Everything we have discussed has been based on the assumption that the role of listening in a language program is to help develop learners’ abilities to understand things they listen to.

This approach to teaching of listening is based on the following assumptions:

  • Listening serves the goal of extracting meaning from messages.
  • To do this, learners have to be taught how to use both bottom-up and top-down processes to understand messages.

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