All this week, we’ve been celebrating the publication of Penny Ur’s new book 100 Teaching Tips, the latest in our Cambridge Handbook for Language Teachers series. Today, we’re sharing with you two of the book’s 100 hands-on tips across 19 different areas of classroom teaching, based on Penny’s comprehensive teaching experience in ELT over the past 40 years.

Talk a lot

Contrary to some opinions you might have heard, lots of teacher talk in English is actually a good thing. It’s an excellent source of English language comprehensible input.

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Learning new vocabulary

Why not take a student-centred approach to presenting new vocabulary? Let students decide which vocabulary items they don’t know first, and give them time to work out the meaning from pictures, context, or examples. If they’ve tried to work out the meaning for themselves, they’re more likely to remember vocabulary than when they’re passively told it.

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Educators are often asking themselves, ‘why should we engage with technology in the classroom?’ One of the key reasons is that technology provides valuable learning opportunities for educators which can then be applied to ensure technology is adopted in a cost effective, pedagogically sound way that is more likely to lead to learning.

To help illustrate this, let me tell you a story.

“…and this is our language lab!” the English teacher said, as she opened the door.

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