The “skills” in English language teaching are: reading, writing, listening and speaking. These are sometimes broken down into sub-skills.
Each one requires a different approach, different exercises and activities, and different assessment. Some students will have a bias towards one or more skills and in a very general way, some nationalities will also. This depends on how they have been previously taught as well as how their mother-tongue compares to English.
The articles here look at the different skills in TEFL and how you can deal with them as a TEFL teacher.
Writers and editors tend to have strong opinions about the Oxford comma. If you don’t regularly work with words and grammar, however, you might not even be aware of what the Oxford comma is although you might be using it (or not) in your writing. Let’s break down what you […]
From SZA to the Stone of Scone, the words that help tell the story of 2023 were often mispronounced Some of the words tied to this year’s hottest topics were also among the most mangled when it came to saying them aloud, with stumpers ranging from the first name […]
Writing is often the last of the four major language skills to be learned after listening, speaking and reading. Subject Matter The first question to ask is what kind of writing will your students be doing? Like all language learning, practice needs to be relevant to the students. This means […]
Tongue Twisters are useful ways to practice pronunciation with your class, especially if the sound you are practicing does not exist in the students’ mother tongue. For example, the /ʃ/ sound does not exist in Greek and is often pronounced /s/ by Greek students. This means students there will often […]
Quite a number of Asian students have problems distinguishing between the /r/ sound and the /l/ sound. Essentially this is because the difference in these sounds does not exist in their mother tongues and so they are unable to “hear” the difference. Thus some students will say led – /led/ […]