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

In today’s world, the skillsets of cognitive flexibility are more critical and valuable than ever before. These skillsets include:

• Open-minded evaluation of different opinions, perspectives, and points of view
• Willingness to risk mistakes
• Consideration of multiple ways to solve problems
• Engagement in learning, discovery, and problem solving with innovative creativity

My previous posts in this series described strategies to build students’ executive functions of organization, prioritizing, judgment, and critical analysis. In this post, I’ll suggest ways to activate your students’ developing neural networks of skillsets for cognitive flexibility. Students with these skillsets will be prepared to achieve their highest potentials for cognitive flexibility and the creative cognition to embrace the as-yet-unknown opportunities awaiting them in the 21st century.

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[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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