Author: Jill Hadfield; Charles Hadfield Publisher: Oxford University Press Details: Paperback; 80 pages; Pub. 1999 ISBN: 0194421694 This book contains 30 activities at elementary level, complete with ideas for boardwork and pictures teachers can copy. All the...
Spelling in English Writing
Spelling is the order in which letters are put to make up words. Many languages have phonetic spelling, in other words, each letter represents a certain sound, however in English this is not the case. An English letter can have many different sounds. For example, the...
TOEFL – Test of English as a Foreign Language
The TOEFL (pronounce toy-full or toe-full) or Test of English as a Foreign Language is an American test designed to establish how well a person speaks English. It is often used by students wishing to attend American universities, etc. Since it was introduced in 1964...
Penny Ur
Penny Ur is a renowned ELT expert, author and teacher trainer. She was educated in the UK and earned her first MA at Oxford University. She then studied for her PGCE at Cambridge University and later got her MA TEFL at Reading university. In 1967 she emigrated to...
ESL – English as a Second Language
ESL is an acronym for English as a Second Language. ESL students are people learning English as a second language, that is, as another language after their mother tongue or primary language. ESL programs are mainly for people living in an English speaking country,...
What is Collocation?
The more you use language, the more you realise that certain words tend to hang around together like best friends forever. For example, if you have a decent knowledge of English you can probably guess the missing words here: a foregone __________ New Year!a _____...
Direct Method in TEFL
The direct method was born out of a need for a more intuitive approach to language learning. Supporters of the DM maintained that language learning was more than the learning of grammar rules and that learning a language could not be based only on one's translation...
Email in the TEFL/TESOL Classroom
I'm an online English teacher here's an idea I'm experimenting with. I've got 3 online students I teach. One is in China, the second in Poland and the third in Italy. Until last week they'd never even heard about each other, they'd just dealt with me online (sending...
Period / Full Stop
A Period (AmE) or Full Stop (BrE) is a punctuation mark placed at the end of a sentence. The symbol itself comes from Aristophanes of Byzantium who invented the system of punctuation where the height of placement of a dot on the line determined its meaning. A dot...
Exclamation Marks!
An Exclamation Mark or ! is a punctuation symbol used at the end of a sentence to denote strong feeling: surprise, anger, exuberance: I love you! Get out! I won! It is sometimes known as a bang, a screamer, a shriek, a slammer, a startler, or a pling. Some...