Posts

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An EFL Teacher’s Journal of the Plague Year

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.

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EFL Academic Reading

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!

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IATEFL Hungary – Towards Becoming an Autodidact

Title Screen - Becoming an Autodidact
My presentation at IATEFL Hungary 2019 in Budapest

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!

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SCELT Bratislava – Supporting Teachers With Dyslexia

Putting the final touches to my presentation.

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the SCELT Bratislava conference in late September. The focus of the session was on Special Education Needs (or SEN if you prefer acronyms). I ran a session on Supporting Teachers with Dyslexia, the powerpoint presentation for which you can download here.

I want to thank both the Chamber for having me, and for my school. International House Bielsko-Biala, for their support.

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IATEFL Poland – Creative Writing Workshop

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.

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‘Zero Preparation Games’

ZeroPreparationGames
‘Zero Preparation Games’ – a PowerPoint presentation for English Language Teachers

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!

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‘Sixty-Six Lessons for Autodidacts’

The front cover of the new book, ‘Sixty-Six Lessons for Autodidacts’.

English grammar is not really all that difficult. Sure, some aspects take a while to master, but by the time you’ve been studying English for three or four years, you’ll have met all the grammar you’re ever going to need.

That’s not true with vocabulary!

English vocabulary seems to go on and on, and yet to be considered fluent you need to know a massive amount of it. How can anyone be expected to learn so much?

Well, that’s where my book, ‘Sixty-Six Lessons for Autodidacts’ comes in.

The book contains – you’ve guessed it! – sixty-six lessons, each of which looks at the words you might use when you talk about a particular topic. Then you’ll look at a selection of words that are related to the originals, and expand out from there. Pretty soon, you’ll find yourself learning ten words instead of one, and because they’re all logically related, they’re easier to remember.

The book is available as a paperback here:

Amazon (US)

Amazon (UK)

And as a pdf digital download through the Closely Observed shop.

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Christopher Walker on Slawomir Mrozek

Read my article about the life and work of the Polish satirist and absurdist, Slawomir Mrozek, author of ‘The Elephant’ and other books and plays.

I was first introduced to Mrozek through my wife, who bought one of his books for me as a Christmas present – I have been indebted to her ever since, as Mrozek is in many ways just as fascinating a writer as Franz Kafka. His brilliantly dark absurdist tales are definitely worth reading if you are of an anti-establishment kind of bent, but if you are more into antidisestablishmentarianism, I’m not sure if his is the work for you. Well, it might be – I’m not 100% sure what the word rightly means…