Articles published in the ‘Issue 28: Spring 2010’ Category
Digital stories By Digital stories are created by weaving together images, music and voiceover narrations into engaging two to three-minute movies. The stories, told in the first person, are inspired by significant events, people or places in the narrator's life and/or can be based on a certain theme. First developed in the 1990s at the Center ...
Livemocha and the power of social language learning by Clint Schmidt Like many great innovations, the premise seems obvious in hindsight. Shirish Nadkarni, the founder of Livemocha, was traveling with his family in Spain and was discouraged to find that years of solid marks in high school Spanish classes had not adequately equipped his teenage kids to ...
The presentation reformation by David Moran Why is it that the presentations at teacher’s conferences are so awful? I sit there in the audience thinking how can you tell me something about teaching when you present like that. I imagine that if their lessons were like that their students would overthrow the teacher, assign them to ...
Testing . . . testing . . . the IH Kazakhstan test preparation teacher training course by Adrienne Radcliffe Like many teachers I was basically thrown into teaching my first exam preparation class. My CELTA qualification and one year of experience did not prepare me for the paper-based TOEFL: random, discrete item multiple choice testing of grammar, ...
by Martin Keon With summer fast approaching and recruitment issues arising for summer schools, this article has been written to offer some insight into summer schools for teachers doing this for the first time. It is based on my own experience of teaching and senior positions in summer schools. I’ve been teaching in summer schools for four ...
by David Will I was chatting to a friend of mine, at the time Vice-President of a prominent Australian university. He was lamenting the recent death of a Chinese student at his institution. It was a suicide, and it was not the only one he said. He explained that the student had been struggling to keep up ...
Lucy Horsefield - Chief Operating Officer, International House World Organisation lucy.horsefield@ihworld.co.uk We enjoyed a busy and exciting start to 2010, starting with the Director of Studies Conference on HMS Belfast in January and then the Young Learner Conference hosted by IH Kyiv in March. This was quickly followed by attendance at the British Council ELTon Awards ...
Reviewed by Neil Preston, IH Brisbane Doing Task-based Teaching offers a great way in for teachers who are interested in incorporating task-based activities into their lessons, but also has a lot to offer for those people who are already familiar with, and using task-based teaching. The main strength of this book is the sheer amount of ...
Reviewed by Stefano Maraessa, IH Mexico City The Task-Based (TB from now on) approach has always intrigued me since I started my teaching career, therefore, when I was asked to review this book, I thought of it as an enormous opportunity to both deepen and further my understanding of the topic. And it did! Rod Ellis' book ...