One of our ICAL students blogs about her duties as English Teacher in a public school in Korea. Writing under the pseudonym of Elsa Kellenbence, she gives a straightforward and honest account of her on-going struggle to keep discipline in the classroom, get students...
Reading with very young learners often demands a different approach to teaching reading skills with older learners. For one thing young learners may not yet be able to read well in their own language so dealing with a different language (and possibly a different...
We'd like to welcome Larry Jarocki, MA Applied Linguistics, as a guest author of the ICAL Blog. Larry has been an ICAL tutor for over a decade. Here he talks about his recent findings on effective group work in the ESL classroom, following an eight days seminar on...
Living in a foreign country it's sometimes easy to assume you are above the law. You feel slightly outside local society and it's not hard to pretend that the local laws simply don't really apply to you. After all, you are from the USA or the UK (or wherever) and...
Generally speaking - and there are exceptions - adverbs can come in 1 of 3 positions in a sentence: 1) At the beginning: Hurriedly I got dressed. Never go there again! Always look on the bright side of life. 2) Between the subject and the verb: I hurriedly got...
Aptis is an examination and assessment test developed by the British Council. It is targeted towards businesses and organizations (and is not available to individual users) in order to test a students ability in the four language skills. However clients can adapt...
WARNING The Department of State warns U.S. citizens against all travel to Libya and recommends that U.S. citizens currently in Libya depart immediately. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office advise against all travel to Libya due to the ongoing fighting, threat...
The following is an example Coursebook Evaluation Form. If you are thinking of using a TEFL coursebook with your class and want to see if it might be suitable, complete this kind of form to find out. Obviously this is a general example, but with a little tweaking you...
A compound word is a word made up from two or more other words joined together. They are often created to describe a new concept or idea and are thus neologisms. As a simple example, take the words foot and ball. These were brought together to describe the game:...
In our article on LGBT teachers (link below) we quote Scott Thornbury who suggests that TEFL attracts a higher percentage of gay teachers. In his article Window Dressing vs Cross Dressing in EFL Sub-Culture he actually talks about the relatively high proportion of...
