Ryan Lochte: a conversation lesson

The Olympic games are the gift that keeps on giving for conversation lessons. Although the games ended two weeks ago, they are still being talked about and we now have the Paralympic games starting tomorrow.

The Ryan Lochte story interests me firstly because I like swimming, but also because it’s so crazy that you almost end up believing it (as in, nobody would be that stupid and entitled, would they?).

This lesson can be used with students who are B1+, but there are follow-up activities for C1 students as well.

Teaching grammar without a book: third person singular

Since I posted a lesson about inversions a while back, I have been thinking about writing more about grammar. I haven’t used many coursebooks recently, so I figured a personalized grammar lesson may interest other teachers.

While working in a Celta course, I usually only observe candidates teaching. However, if a candidate doesn’t show up for his or her teaching practice, I need to step up and fill in the void so that other candidates’ lessons are not affected.

The lesson I’m sharing today is one I prepared for such an occasion. It’s aimed at adult elementary students but, with minimal adaptations, it could be used with adolescents as well.

TBT: Teaching Inversions in Speaking

In anticipation of this year’s Braz-Tesol international convention, I have decided to have my first Throwback Thursday. Back in 2012 I delivered a talk at Braz-Tesol for the first time, about a topic that is near and dear to my heart: inversions after negative adverbials.

I also published something similar at Luiz Otávio Barros’ blog many years ago. The link to the main video is dead, so I though it was worth posting it again.

Error correction in one-to-one lessons

Error correction is something I have been thinking a lot about recently. This was partly motivated by Luiz Otávios plenary (which I wrote about here), but also because I have been observing lessons every week as a Celta tutor in training.

I have previously written about error correction in conversation lessons here and more in general here, so today I’m going to tackle it from the perspective of one-to-one lessons.

How to get a distinction in your Delta module 2 Background Essays

I suppose the title could be considered clickbait, but the idea is to try to help you to do well during Delta module 2. I got a distinction in my first three Background Essays, and imagine LSA4 (which is externally assessed) was up to the same standard. You can do it too, and I think the following tips and reading suggestions will help.