Dogme ELT

Shut Up!

/ James Taylor / 8 Comments

Let’s face it, one of the hardest things for us teachers to do sometimes is to shut up. We can feel the need to keep teaching all the time and somewhere deep in our subconscious  we have been led to believe that teaching means talking.

Maybe we don’t realise what we are doing, or we find it hard to resist. We might be waiting for the training that makes us realise it’s okay to be quiet for a while, or we might have a great story we want to share and half way through we realise we’re really going on a bit too much here. Continue reading →

52: Bailout

/ James Taylor / 10 Comments
52 by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings is an e-book collection of subversive activities for the ELT classroom (see also the support blog Subversive Teaching 52). Each of the activities in the book attempt to engage the learner and the teacher in a challenging conversation. They are both forced to question, investigate and debate the world that we live in.

Since I like to push my students to engage critically with materials, I’m always on the lookout for interesting and demanding stimuli for my lessons. Subsequently this book was just what I was looking for.

Continue reading →

IATEFL Issues: Dogme (or Wandering Naked Through the Dogme Forest…)

/ James Taylor / 15 Comments

So Dogme ELT was one of the big issues of the conference. Big surprise, I hear you say. Well I’m sorry if you’re tired hearing about it, but it’s not going away. If this conference proved anything, it showed firstly that there are still a lot of teachers who don’t know what Dogme ELT is, and secondly that even some of the ones who have heard of it don’t really know what it is, even though they think they do. More about that later… Continue reading →

Video Games Unplugged

/ James Taylor / 4 Comments

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 →