World Teachers’ Day, also known as International Teachers Day, is held annually on October 5. Established in 1994, it commemorates the signing of the 1966 UNESCO/ILO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers, which is a standard-setting instrument that addresses the status and situations of teachers around the world. This recommendation outlines standards relating to education personnel policy, recruitment, and initial training as well as the continuing education of teachers, their employment, and working conditions. World Teachers’ Day aims to focus on “appreciating, assessing and improving the educators of the world” and to provide an opportunity to consider issues related to teachers and teaching.

The New A-Z of ELT

The New A-Z of ELT is a practical and informative guide that is indispensable to teachers and teacher trainers of all levels of experience. The new edition has been revised and restructured to take recent developments in language teaching into account. It is a fully cross-referenced, alphabetical guide to ELT that defines and explains essential language teaching concepts and terminology from fields including grammar, linguistics, discourse analysis, digital pedagogues, and phonology.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

400 Ideas for Interactive Whiteboards

400 Ideas for Interactive Whiteboards provides a wealth of resources to help teachers integrate the digital board into their classrooms. It provides ideas for using regular programs and software, as well as offering suggestions on how to create specifically-tailored resources. Activities are categorised according to skill focus, making them easy to locate. It also contains suggestions for project work, “learning to learn” activities and “the connected classroom”.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

500 Activities for the Primary Classroom

“This book is the answer to that perennial question What on earth am I going to do with my class tomorrow?It provides a lively, varied compendium of ideas.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

700 Classroom Activities

This book provides a huge instant repertoire of teaching ideas – including both classroom classics that all ELT teachers come to know and love and fresh, new activities at a range of levels from elementary to upper intermediate. — Macmillan Education.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

Beyond the Sentence

How do we design sentences to fit their purposes and how do we combine them to communicate complex, contextualized meanings? This work takes discourse apart to show how it is organized and how it aids communication.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

Blended Learning

The ideal companion for any teacher interested in the use of technology in the language classroom, Blended Learning provides a practical overview of the technology currently available. It combines basic information for the technological novice with sophisticated ideas for using technology in the classroom. Teachers are offered practical ideas and suggestions for ways to use technology to enhance and support student’s learning. The authors also examine the implications of the use of technology for language teaching methodology in general.

Price: 85Gel 51Gel

Discover English

Language awareness is the key to success in the language classroom. Discover English will help you to understand and explain common problems in English. It suggests motivating and practical activities which lead to learning. It is designed for use both in teacher training seminars and as self study. Exercises in the first part of this book establish basic principles and explore common area of difficulty. A full key in the second part included commentaries on the issues raised by the exercises and insights into teaching.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

Learning Teaching 3rd Edition

“Learning Teaching” has been one of the most successful guides to English since it was first published in 1994. Its no-nonsense approach has made it a superb teaching textbook for initial training courses, and also an essential handbook for practising ELT teachers. The third edition has been extensively revised and restructured to take recent developments in ELT into account and now includes a DVD featuring a full lesson being taught as well as demonstrations of practical teaching techniques.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

Sound Foundations

Sound Foundations is an ideal introduction to the English phonological system and an invaluable resource both for teachers of full pronunciation courses and for those who sould ismply like to improve the quality of their work on pronunciation. It offers information on pronunciation systems as well as practical activities which can be used in pronunciation classes and in regular language lessons. The discovery approach means both you and your students learn through physically experiencing how pronunciation works. The latest edition includes an Audio CD which contains clearly recorded examples of the sounds described in the book.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

Teaching Reading Skills

Teaching Reading Skills describes how the texts we read are organized to communicate meanings. It examines what is involved in effective reading and suggests ways of helping students to develop into effective readers in a foreign language. It is especially useful for exam and EAP classes and also includes an invaluable chapter on testing reading skills written by Charles Alderson.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

Teaching English Grammar

The perfect companion for both trainees and teacher trainers following courses such as the Cambridge CELTA, and the Trinity Certificate in TESOL, as well as teachers who are unsure of how to present grammar or those who are looking for new ways to present it. Teaching English Grammar aims to combine language information and methodological help in a straightforward, authoritative way and thus help English language teachers prepare and deliver grammar lessons within their syllabus. The book provides teachers with an authoritative and practical handbook on teaching grammar and helps to make preparing grammar lessons easy and straightfoward.

Price: 85Gel 51Gel

Uncovering CLIL

Uncovering CLIL is a practical and informative handbook which will be of use to teachers of all levels of experience. It examines language and content teaching, and reveals how the two can go hand in hand, giving examples of how to use CLIL at primary, secondary and vocational levels. Packed with practical ideas and suggestions, it is the essential companion for CLIL teachers.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

Uncovering Grammar

As teachers we often talk about ‘covering’ grammar points. Scott Thornbury explains why it is more useful to think about how we ‘uncover’ grammar, to reveal the workings of the system to our students and encourage them to notice what is going on. The book uses extracts from exchanges in real classrooms, authentic texts and language teaching tasks. It provides lots of practical activities so that you can immediately and easily put the ideas to work in your classroom.

Price: 89,5Gel 53.7Gel

HOW TO GET YOUR STUDENTS SPEAKING IN CLASS

Author: Katherine Stannett

Reading Time: 4 minutes

How can we get our learners talking? A combination of factors can often inhibit our students from speaking out loud – fear of making mistakes in front of their peers; not knowing what to say; not feeling motivated or interested in the topic. If we want to engage our students and get them talking in the classroom, we need to create a structured, safe environment, where they can talk about topics that interest them and things that they can relate to their own lives and culture.

So here are my top seven tips for avoiding those deadly silences …

1          Preparation. Don’t expect your teens suddenly to have an opinion about recycling, favorite festivals, healthy living or whatever your topic of the week is. Use a reading or listening text to act as your prompt and elicit reactions from that. Or have your students do some independent research first and then share their findings in groups.

2          Pair work (or small group work). Students who may be nervous of speaking out loud in front of the whole class, often feel much safer when working one to one with a peer. But make sure that one person isn’t dominating the conversation. Monitor pair work activities, walking around the classroom and checking that students are sharing the talking.

3          Prompts. Giving students some written prompts can help to encourage reluctant speakers. For example, you could provide the starting words for each sentence and then have students complete the sentences with their own ideas. Let’s imagine you want students to talk about a festival from their country. You could write prompts like these on the board:

• This festival celebrates …
• It’s in {Spring / Summer / November …}
• In this festival, we sing / eat / wear …
• I like this festival because …

This gives students a safe and structured way to start the speaking activity and helps to direct their conversation.

4    Points. Students love competitions, so work some point-giving tasks into the speaking activity.  For example, if you’re having a class discussion about the environment, brainstorm related vocabulary onto the board first. Divide the class into teams and then ask a discussion question: How do you help to recycle at home? Have each team discuss the question for a few minutes and then go round the class, eliciting ideas from each team. Teams win a point for every word on the board which they manage to include in their spoken responses.

5        Pictures. Great pictures and photos are a powerful way to evoke responses from students. In the National Geographic Primary course, Look, we open every unit with a thought-provoking photo and ask some discussion questions about the picture.

This picture is from Level 5, Unit 1. We ask students to look at the photo and discuss the following questions:

1 Where are these people?

2 What are they doing? Why?

3 Why do you think they can’t use their phones to make phone calls?

4 How do you communicate with the following people: your school friends; your family; people who live far away?

Look out for pictures that are unusual or that might inspire your students to ask questions.The National Geographic ‘Your Shot’ page is a very useful resource for stunning photos.

6         Personal. Students love to talk about themselves, as long as they’re allowed to define the parameters of the conversation. Don’t expect them to share intimate details of how their family situation is set up, and be aware of discussions that may highlight differences in family income or social status. However, talking about subjects like favorite childhood games; pets; family meals or first experiences allows students to explore familiar subjects, encouraging them to speak out when more alien topics may not engage them.

7          Positivity (not Perfection!) There are plenty of opportunities to correct your students, but try to avoid too much correction during a speaking activity. Respond to students’ spoken output positively, picking up on the ideas they express and making a note of any common errors for correction and practice later on in the lesson. The more confident your students feel, the more they will speak and the more they speak, the better they will get!

I hope these tips will help you next time you’re planning a speaking activity with your students. How about you? Do you have any great ways to encourage your students to speak out in class? Do share them in the comments section below!

Source: National Geographic Learning

In this article, Vaclav Brezina, author of Statistics in Corpus Linguistics: A Practical Guide and Linguistics and English Language lecturer discusses the changing use of pronouns in spoken English.

We rarely think of pronouns – small words such as I, you, my, they and their etc. However, we use these small words very frequently in everyday language. In fact, research shows that personal pronouns occur 100 thousand times per million words in current spoken British English. This means that on average, every tenth word in a sentence will be a pronoun. We also know that there is an interesting gender pattern in pronoun use: generally, women use more pronouns than men. Women are typically engaged in a more involved style of speaking with frequent references to the speaker (I) and other people (he, she, they etc.). There are also differences according to the social class and the region.

Pronoun use has also changed over time, one of the major changes is the way we address other people. For example, in Shakespeare’s times the personal pronoun thou (‘Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio’ Hamlet, I,1.) was used to refer to a single person in a conversation as opposed to multiple people, in which case you would be used. This distinction has disappeared since then – in fact already in Shakespeare’s times the use of you and thou was often interchangeable – and thou has vanished from everyday use. Occasionally, today we can still see thou being used in citations or for humorous purposes:

S1: yeah but we could go in the car S2: yes S1: what thinkest thou? S2: uhu have to get up early (Spoken BNC 2014).

Indeed, we can see that for a number of practical reasons it is useful to be able to distinguish between referring to one person and a group of people. Think of a situation when you want to invite multiple people to join you for a drink or chat. Which pronoun would you use? ‘Would ____ like to come along?’

Now thou is no longer available, speakers have come up with new ways of indicating whether they are talking to one or more people. You all, you guys, everyone etc. are expressions used to address multiple people as opposed to the simple you. Research shows that especially the expression you guysis on a steep rise in current spoken English. Since the early nineties, the frequency of its use in conversation has increased over 15 times.

The research highlighted in this blogpost is based on two large datasets of spoken British English. The Spoken British National Corpus 1994 and the Spoken British National Corpus 2014; the more recent dataset provides important insights into the most recent use of spoken British English and has been jointly developed by Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press.

Would you like to do some linguistic research yourself?

It is very easy. Lancaster University (Leaders of the project: Vaclav Brezina and Dana Gablasova) has developed an online platform called BNClab. The BNClab provides a user-friendly interface for exploring current British English and comparing it to English from the 1990s. The website offers a number of resources for A-level English language, and will soon offer ESL/EFL resources for students and teachers.

Search for examples of pronoun use:

1. Go to BNClab
2. Search for: PRONOUN. Look at examples of pronouns and their distribution in different groups: gender, age, social groups and in different regions of the UK.
3. Follow the instructions in the handoutsprovided and explore the use of pronouns in spoken Englishand much more…

This project has been endorsed by Cambridge University Press, AQA, English Media Centre and Trinity College London. It has been supported by ESRC grant no. EP/P001559/1.

If you’re interested in spoken language then you might enjoy Sarah Grieves’ article on the growing use of ‘yeah no’ in spoken English, found in the Spoken British National Corpus.