When things are going well, institutions are slow to change. Student numbers on EAP (English for Academic Purposes) pre-sessional courses in the UK have been increasing steadily over the past decade that I have been teaching EAP. So there was…
If you have not already, you can read part one of this article here. Learning through interaction in virtual reality requires careful pedagogical planning, not magic. Nergiz Kern In the previous blog post, we looked at why adding interaction to a…
Interaction of all sorts is pervasive in the physical world (Cai, Tay and Ngo, 2013), perhaps even central to our existence. We interact with other people, with other living beings, with objects, with information – we can even say that…
Introduction If you are anything like me, you consider multiple elements as you plan out your lessons. You consider what you are going to teach, what materials you will use, what activities you will engage students in, how you will…
I like to take off time from work after the intensive summer pre-sessional teaching. In fact, this year, I wanted to take a kind of ‘sabbatical’ if that’s possible for a freelancer, and reflect on what direction I wanted to…
As the landscape for technology use in the classroom changes, many teachers are preparing for online supported teaching and learning long term. While challenging, it’s clear that the future of learning incorporates much more technology. The impacts on teachers are…
Is creativity a talent we’re born with or a skill we can learn? A quick search on the internet will show that it’s probably both. We are all born creative, but are educated out of it, and then have to…
I’m very interested in using virtual reality environments for teaching ESP (English for Specific Purposes) or ESAP (English for Specific Academic Purposes). However, the problem is that it takes a lot of technical skills, time, effort and cost to develop…
Storytelling is probably as old as humans existence.* All good storytellers try to immerse their audience in their realistic or fantastic stories, bring their characters to life and generate emotions in their listeners by all kinds of means: simply using their voice,…
As a (former) photographer, I love using images in language classes. Images, particularly those taken or created by learners, also make for great material in language classes and lend themselves for many different kinds of activities while giving agency to…