Language Awareness: Grammar

Parts of speech and basic tenses – check out this introductory video by Kate, one of Active Language’s teacher trainers

Onestop English Grammar Reference – find links here to articles on teaching different tenses with ideas for activities

Verb Tenses – highly comprehensive aid for tenses from English Page

Timelines – we use timelines a lot to help learners understand tenses. This article from the British Council gives further information about why and how we use them

Language Awareness: Lexis

Presenting Vocabulary – a very useful article from the British Council

Is lexis more important than grammar? – a potentially controversial article from Hugh Dellar

Teaching chunks rather than semantic sets – an interesting approach from Leo Sullivan

Dependent Prepositions – a very comprehensive list with verbs, adjectives and nouns

Teaching Collocations – a good guide to different types of collocations and possible issues with them

Language Awareness: Phonology

Cambridge English Phonetics Focus

Onestop English Interactive Phonemic Chart

Adrian Underhill’s site – fabulous input from the creator of the Sound Foundations phonemic chart

HancockMcDonald – excellent resources for teaching phonology

Methodology

An Overview of ELT Methodologies

Miscellaneous

British Council Teaching Knowledge Database – great go-to site for terminology, methodology, classroom management techniques and more

ELT Glossary – my own collection of terms and acronyms

Asking effective ICQs – Giving clear instructions can be difficult and effective instruction-check questions (ICQs) can really help your learners understand the task. This article from eltresource.com has some good tips

About Spanish Speakers

One of the assignments on the course asks you to work with an individual learner, providing a needs analysis based on their linguistic skills and tailoring a one-hour lesson to their needs.  As most of our learners are Spanish, the following articles will give you some guidance on typical problems they have when using English:

Verbling – Top 5 mistakes Spanish speakers make in English

Going English – Common errors Spanish speakers make in English