[ELTWeekly Volume 10, Issue 10 | May 7, 2018 | ISSN 0975-3036]

“All right—any questions? No? Go!” I told my eighth-grade integrated science students as we began a lesson in which they were to make and support a claim about where in the classroom they should put the starting point for a marble roller coaster. Most got right to work. However, one student looked blankly at his paper, broken pencil in hand. Another stared into space. A third crafted something distracting out of paper.

What had gone wrong? They didn’t raise their hands when I asked if anyone had a question. How could I reach these students?

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[ELTWeekly Volume 10, Issue 10 | May 7, 2018 | ISSN 0975-3036]

In a Socratic seminar, Socratic circle, fishbowl, or Harkness discussion, the primary goal is for students to engage in and sustain an academic discussion independent of the teacher. The benefits of student-led discussions are well documented—students learn to purposefully reference the text as evidence as they develop opinions, and they learn to be more receptive to and respectful of the ideas of others.

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[ELTWeekly Volume 10, Issue 10 | May 7, 2018 | ISSN 0975-3036]

* Published from Cambridge ELT Blog.

In this article Marcin Lewandowski looks at processing and memorising data in chunks, to aid vocabulary learning in the EFL classroom.

Let’s try a little experiment. Look at the following letters for a few seconds: R, O, Z, R, Y, W, K, A. Now, look away and write the letters on a sheet of paper from memory.

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