Category: book review

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Book review – 50 Activities For The First Day Of School

James Taylor

50 Activities For The First Day Of School, published by Alphabet Publishing, is, as the title suggests, a highly practical resource book for teachers looking for ways to add some variety to their first day activities. The author, Walton Burns, has created this ebook as a handy guide containing a variety of tasks mainly for lower level learners, although they are easily adaptable for all abilities and ages. In fact, one of the book’s main strengths is the flexibility the activities have, and it’s easy to imagine them being tweaked for use in any lesson. Walton starts with the most … Continue reading Book review – 50 Activities For The First Day Of School

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Book review: Punctuation…? by User Design

James Taylor

Readers of this blog will remember a previous post in which I argue that punctuation errors by students shouldn’t be ignored… There is a temptation to ignore (punctuation errors) which must be resisted, I think. It’s very easy to think that the priority must be the vocabulary and grammar, and while I would agree with that, it doesn’t have to come at the expense of form. If the students are writing in the first place, they need to understand that in a professional capacity, which is how most students will use their writing abilities in English, poor writing can create … Continue reading Book review: Punctuation…? by User Design

book review, Dogme ELT, technology4 Comments

Video Games Unplugged

James Taylor

I’m currently reading Kyle Mawer and Graham Stanley’s Digital Play, published by DELTA, for a book review (which I’ll share with you as soon as it’s online). So far it’s a great book, passionately and convincingly arguing for a place for video games in the ELT classroom.

The second part of the book, and the biggest, contains a myriad of activities, including ones that are about video games rather than using video games. I was particularly struck by an activity on page 39 called Game Chatalogue. The essence of the activity is that students use video game catalogues to discuss what they find interesting. Continue reading “Video Games Unplugged”