[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 13 | July 25, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

In this week’s webinar, Cambridge English Empower author Craig Thaine explored the differences between teachers’ perceptions of learners’ needs, and learners’ own views. Sharing the results of a case study of a small multi-lingual group of advanced level learners studying at a private English school, Craig considered what the survey tells us not only about what advanced learners want to study, but also how they want to study.

Craig began the webinar by considering the key characteristics of advanced learners, according to both the teachers and learners involved in the case study. In the absence of any generally agreed definition of what we mean by ‘advanced’ learners, he agreed that the best option might be to adopt a ‘family resemblance’ approach, where advanced learners are seen as sharing some, but not necessarily all, of a set of characteristics.

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[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 13 | July 25, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036]

Ken Paterson says, “This, these, that and those

Over the years, I’ve had a complex relationship with the demonstrative determiners.

Before I started teaching English, I can’t remember giving them a moment’s thought.

Then, after a few years of saying to students (with appropriate hand gestures), ‘This is for things that are near to us, and that is for things that are far away’, I started to get interested in ‘text analysis’ and ‘cohesive devices’, and went a bit over-the-top, getting students to highlight determiners, and the words or phrases they referred to, in a complex code of colours and arrows that made their handouts look like early abstract art.

By the time I met my first English for Academic Purposes class, however, I’d calmed down a little.

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[ELTWeekly Volume 8, Issue 12 | July 18, 2016 | ISSN 0975-3036] Edutopia – Finding an Authentic Goal for Your PBL Classroom Research Paper: ‘Cultural Pigeonholes in English Language Teaching…