Artículos escritos por profesores particulares de Inglés nativos

The topic shopping may be appropriate for an open group of pre-intermediate teen-age learners with mixed or similar abilities. Shopping, especially under parents’ supervision, might arouse students’ curiosity and activate their schemata, something they have already experienced. Definitely, this topic may help them understand the meaning of the whole text at the stage of gist reading, do comprehension tasks at the stage of close reading and get ...

How often do you talk about learning with youtr students? Have you ever asked them how they learn best? Do you adapt your lessons to suit your learners? What methods and techniques and approaches do you use in the classroom? Reflecting on these questions are fundamental to developing as a teacher. In this article, I will talk about teaching methods and I hope it encourages you to reflect on your teaching practice, explore new ideas and ultimate...

Seguramente muchas veces te has propuesto aprender inglés; ya bien sea porque es un idioma necesario para tu trabajo, para superar tus cursos académicos o por el placer de aprender, pero con el paso del tiempo, lejos de hacerlo lo que has conseguido es olvidar lo que ya habías aprendido. O por el contrario sabes que necesitas aprender inglés pero los idiomas no son lo tuyo o simplemente el inglés no te gusta. Sea cual sea el nivel que poseas de ...

Welcome to my world. The world is not perfect.  We have seen that with the Covid-19 pandemic that forced us to pause in all of our normal routines. We have seen this in the way schools in Europe     suffered outbreaks, and in the UK where several universities' halls of residences were under different types of lockdown. This led many schools to turn to online teaching solutions and with that the differences from learning ...

Choice of Focus The focus of this essay will be helping elementary learners with informal writing.  Getting lower level students to write informal letters and postcards is important for a variety of reasons especially when we consider the context of teaching monolingual classes in Spain.  I have noticed a shift in how learners’ perceive their needs when it comes to writing.  Whereas 10 years ago most learners mentioned the desire ...

Dictogloss differs from more traditional EFL dictations in a number of ways.  The most important difference is that the dictogloss approach centers on grammar and allows both students and teachers to identify what learners do not know and what they need to know (Wajnryb 10).  The beauty of this approach is that it allows for a compromise between what learners feel they want= grammar, and what teachers want to give them= “communicative ...

Teaching Suggestions Here are some activities to use in the classroom to help upper intermediate learners with adjectives.  Adjective auction Aim: To make learners aware of the position and order of adjectives. Procedure: Give each pair of students a list of 15 sentences taken from a recent writing assignment they have completed.  Tell students they have 1,000 euros and have to gamble on whether the sentences are correct or not and r...

In this essay I am going to examine teaching the features of adjectives to upper intermediate learners studying general English in Spain.  I think it is important for my learners to become more aware of how adjectives are used in communication both receptively and productively because it matches their needs.   A majority of upper intermediate learners in my context want to pass the FCE exam but they often lack the words to do it.&...

Meaning I find that many of my upper intermediate learners in Spain have not yet established a solid connection between form and hypothetical meaning. And although these same learners understand the concept of hypothetical meaning, they do not always understand the shades of meaning when it comes to negative truth value. In my experience I have found learners do not grasp the differences between describing what we assume to be untrue in the...

In this essay I am going to examine the teaching of hypothetical meaning to upper intermediate level learners. The main reason to look at language to express hypothetical meaning is that it is used in such a wide variety of situations and we imagine, hypothesize, and pretend with great frequency.  Understanding these meanings and being able to express them is useful for upper intermediate level learners and ultimately meets their needs. I h...

Teaching suggestions These activities can be used with any text from magazines, newspapers or short stories. The Art of Giving Aim:  Practice skimming for global understanding.  Practice scanning to find specific information.  Increase reading speed. Procedure:  Learners look at the title of the article and the photo.  They discuss the question in the subheading in relation to Catalonia.  Learners scan the text to...

How we reach detailed understanding: 5 ideas  Top-down processing When readers comprehend text using a top-down process they use their “previous knowledge and experience of the world” to understand what lies in the text.  That means that comprehension “resides in the reader.”  Top-down processing is about building meaning and the interaction between the reader and text.  Every individual word might not be understood or reco...

The other day, I was asking my online class what games they liked to play with their friends. This being a) the 21st century and b) during lockdown, the answers were centred less around sports and more among online games. I asked the kids to explain the games to me, and was amazed when an A2 level student told me that “you are on a spaceship, and you have to find the imposter”. To me, “imposter” seemed like a very advanced vocabulary word for a ...

Welcome to the travel of what it would be tomorrow´s education. The crew today is going to be an international student currently living in Canada. The weather conditions are… The time that it´ll take to get to our destination is… Every year, a lot of students study abroad hearing this sentences as they start their trip. They might be pushed by their parents or by their own desire. The experience is different for each one, but for all is being ou...