My English Pages

Building a Better Teacher
Good teaching:
good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars
This is a New YorK Times magazine article about how to build good teachers.  When actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, flounders, what should be done? Fire bad teachers?  Train them? Read the article. Here is the link:
Better teachers

ManyThings is a website for people studying English as a Second Language (ESL) or English as a Foreign Language (EFL). There are:

quizzes,
word games,
word puzzles,
proverbs,
slang expressions,
anagrams,
a random-sentence generator
and other computer assisted language learning activities.

Classic and contemporary books
NovelGuide is a free source for literary analysis on the web providing study guides as an educational supplement. It offers:

literature profiles,
metaphor analysis,
theme analysis,
author biographies
sample study questions,
and sample essays.

This web-only article,which I discovered thanks to Larry Ferlazzo,  is a special rich-media presentation of the twelve events that will change everything around us. It can be used as a language resource for English language teachers. The presentation includes the following topics.

Polar meltdown
Extra dimensions
Extraterestrial intelligence
Nuclear exchange
Creation of life
Room temperature supercondutors
Machine self-awareness
Cloning of a human
Pacific earthquake
Fusion energy
Asteroid collision
Deadly pandemic

Teachers can use this rich presentation, as I said, as a resource for efl and esl students.
This web-only article,which I discovered thanks to Larry Ferlazzo,  is a special rich-media presentation …

ELT Links
English language teaching links in different categories prepared by Sean Banville.
Sean needs your contributions to develop his new website. You can suggest new links or submit your own blog or website. Enjoy!

Free ESL materials

Lesson plans and activities blog carnival
I am honored to be part of the ESL/EFL Carnival of Lessons which was hosted by  Karenne Joy Sylvester. The blog carnival includes so many useful and insightful lesson plans. Teachers will have the opportunity to choose from a wide range of activities that they can try in their EFL and ESL classes.Kabreene kindly put the carnival in the form of a prezi which bloggers and site owners can embed.
Thank you Kareene for the effort you implemented to organize these lesson plans.
The ESL …

The English Baccalaureate Exam Specifications All Streams
There has been a change in the bac exam specifications.
Changes  were mainly in the language section. It comprises three content areas: vocabulary, grammar and functions. The objective of the language section is that students should be able to respond accurately and appropriately. The scoring is as follows

VOCABULARY
GRAMMAR
FUNCTIONS

4 points
7 points
4 points

The exam sections consist of

Reading Comprehension (37.5%),
Language (37.5%)
and Writing (25%).

The weighting for all streams:

Reading
Language
Writing

15/40
15/40
10/40

For more details on the new specifications click  to download a PDF file:
Baccalaureate Exam Specifications

This is a link to a cool websites which provides free esl activities:

Teachers can build their own listening quizes.
There is also a shared list for such quizes.
You can also embed the code of the quizes in your blog or website.

ESLvideo.com :: Free ESL/EFL Video Quizzes for English Students :: Free ESL Video Quiz Builder for Teachers — Send Students Quizzes — Track Results.

This is a link to a cool websites for free esl activities:

Teachers can build their own listening quizes.
There is also a shared list for such quizes.
You …

I’d like to share with readers the  posts I’ve read recently. They all carry insightful thoughts and creative ideas that I hope will be of great interest to teachers and educators.

Would da Vinci learn in Today’s Classrooms?
The habitudes that separate creative and genius minds from “the rest of us” and which are discouraged in our schools.
Failure is not an option but it should be!
Failure as part of the learning process.
T is for text
Using texts to teach grammar.- Very insight post and comments on how to use texts as the …

How to teach Grammar by using texts
I have recently discovered Scott Thornbury’s blog A-Z of ELT. I think that this is one of the best English language teaching blogs. Just to give you a hint of how useful it is to English teachers, this is  a post which attracted so many useful and inspiring comments. The post is about how to teach grammar using texts.
There were so many brilliant  contibutions on the part of teachers to suggest different ways to teach the simple past. This shows how successful …