Christopher Walker: EFL Teacher and Writer
My latest article in Modern English Teacher is about a reconsideration of the skills division – how Listening tasks should precede Speaking tasks, and Reading tasks should precede Writing tasks. I also make the point that we should do more to take advantage of the materials we have, and not treat them so lightly.
You can read the article in its digital form on MET.
My latest book is available now from Amazon.
I firmly believe that English is a simple language – so much so that I have written a whole book about the fundaments of English grammar, exploring what lies at the heart of the language.
The book goes through the different parts of the English verb system, looking at the difference between simple and continuous forms, and explaining how the perfect form really works.
We then consider the idea of distance, which explains the reasons for verb form changes in English. Have you ever wondered why Would you like a drink? is more polite than Will you have a drink? This book explains the logic behind the grammar.
Once we have looked at the verb forms and the modals that English has available to it, we then consider how conditionals are structured – they are more regular and understandable than you have been led to believe!
So, who is the book for?
It’s for everyone – it doesn’t matter if you are teaching English as a foreign language, or if you are a student looking to master what you think are deeply irregular sets of rules. This book will help everyone with an interest in the English language.
It’s available now in both the paperback and Kindle edition, via Amazon.
I have a new article out – this one is about scaffolding, which is the idea of making tasks for your students more achievable. I took Duolingo as a case study and considered some of the approaches they implement so successfully.
Read the article here.
English Teacher Professional has been merged with another EFL journal to create Modern English Teacher magazine – and issue one is available now.
One of the articles is my very own – on the search for the perfect metaphor in teaching. If you know me, you’ll know that I love my metaphors, and this two-page article explores some of my favourites over the years.
Subscribers can read the latest issue right here.
My latest book is now available on the Kindle – you can get it here.
I have worked as an EFL teacher for around fifteen years; but the last year and a half have been unlike any other period of my teaching career. This book explores what it has been like to be a teacher whose lessons all ended up online. What were the challenges that the switch introduced, and how were they dealt with? As well as being an account of the year of the plague, this book also contains reflections on the art and practice of teaching English as a Foreign Language, and represents the product of all my years of experience.
If you’re like me, you probably love reading. Over the course of my MA Applied Linguistics & TESOL, my reading habits changed, and I went from reading fiction to burying myself under a metric ton of academic articles.
I loved it. In fact, I loved it so much that now that my MA has finished, I already miss that kind of reading.
So I set up this new Facebook Group – EFL Academic Reading. The idea is simple: every couple of weeks, we find another academic article to read, and then we share our ideas about the article in the Group.
Come on and join us – it’s free, and all the articles we look at will also be freely available online. It should be a lot of fun!
I delivered a talk at the 2020 edition of IATEFL Poland; if you would like to download a copy of the presentation slides, please feel free – they’re available right here.
This October I gave a workshop/talk at IATEFL Budapest on the idea of using etymology in the classroom to train our students in the ways of the autodidact. By giving them a toolkit based on this approach, we can help our students help themselves to the world of vocabulary, freeing us up to look at other areas in the classroom.
If you’d like a copy of the presentation, you can download it here. I want to take this opportunity to thank the International House World Organisation for their support – without them I wouldn’t have made it to Budapest to begin with!
On Friday 20th September I was lucky enough to find myself in glorious Gdansk at this year’s IATEFL Poland conference. My 60-minute workshop was all about a simple framework for giving a creative writing lesson in the EFL classroom. We looked at how to find a ‘point of interest’, and how ‘motivated characters’ could interact with that point in order to give us the foundations for our plot.
If you’d like a copy of the presentation, feel free to download it here. I don’t mind if you use it in your own classes, or as an input session at your school.
Thank you to all who attended, and thank you also to my school, International House Bielsko-Biala, who sponsored me on this trip.
On March 16th I presented a short talk at the International House Torun Teacher Training Day, entitled ‘Zero Preparation Games’. The presentation covered a number of communicative, fun activities that could be used in the language classroom with no materials or advanced preparation required.
If you’d like a copy of the original ppt file used in the presentation, it can be downloaded here. Feel free to use this ppt in your own school – but if you do, please be so kind as to let me know how it went, and if there are any ways in which this file might be improved!