Do you eat breakfast? A conversation lesson for adults.

Today’s lesson comes from me wanting to use a video I really like about breakfast around the world with one of my adult students. We had been talking about food and this particular student likes travelling, so I thought it would be a good match.

I went looking for an article to pair the video with and ended up finding something interesting, in my opinion, about health eating.

This one-to-one lesson took about 60 minutes and was used with an B1+/B2 student. It is aimed at adult students, as they generally are more worried about health issues, but it could be adapted to a younger crowd as well.

Talking about the Paris terror attacks

One of the things I like about being an English teacher is that, depending on the teaching context, you can take a variety of different topics to class and discuss it with students.

For the last few days the terrorist attacks in Paris have dominated the news and I wanted to hear what my students have to say about it. It can be a controversial topic, but I haven’t been afraid of tackling those in the past.

Using phonemic symbols with (one-to-one) students

A couple of days after my blogpost about error correction in one-to-one lessons I had an interesting discussion on Facebook about using phonemic symbols with students.

It had never occurred to me that a teacher would be against it, but apparently that is the case. So I’ve decided to write about the reasons why I think using them is beneficial for students.

Spectre: a conversation lesson about the new 007 movie

Back when I worked for Cultura Inglesa in Rio de Janeiro, the academic department used to send each branch a DVD with video activities based on songs and movie trailers (this was before YouTube was a thing as well). I really looked forward to those and since then I have tried to create my own lessons based on new films.

There has been some buzz about the latest James Bond film, Spectre, as it may be the last one with Daniel Craig. I thought this would be a good fit for one my students who is a young adult, but the topic of films is general enough that this could be used with adolescents and adults.

If you are a big Daniel Craig fan, by the way, you’ll probably also want to check out this funny lesson by Luiz Otávio Barros.

Is Technology Always a Good Thing?

It’s funny how lessons can sometimes come from the most unexpected of places. A couple of weeks ago I was looking for a snippet to use with an advanced level class that included a sample of the passive voice. I found one I liked, and it turns out the snippet had both good language and an interesting topic – technology.

So, after my passive voice lesson I went looking for a text that would match the video I had. I ended up finding two, and they both had points I thought were interesting. Now, usually the texts I use on the blog are authentic (adapted for length), but I can’t claim this is the case here, as I merged both texts into one.