Tides of ELT

Ideas about ELT come and go like the tides. In this slideshow I give a crab’s eye underview of these issues from my corner of the rockpool. Take a look and be an anemone, filtering the water and feeding on any tiny organic particles you can find.

6 Comments

Jean Sciberras

Hi Paul
Thoroughly enjoyed your slideshow. It took us through various approaches and fads, with their advantages and disadvantages. I believe that a combination of styles is the ultimate solution and no one way should be dismissed completely. Save the baby from the bathwater :-). I so agreed with your saying that the native speaker in a meeting is the one that hinders communication, because of his lack of awareness, use of metaphors and localised references. Very, very good presentation. thank you.

Richard Edwards

Very enjoyable presentation – How I wish I had been there to see it ‘in the flesh’! I found it useful and encouraging to see your experienced take on BE. I was also motivated to hear you support certain approaches (such as language feedback and development post task), which we here at Abbey Communication Training in the UK follow too.

I also found myself thinking ‘ah, yes, I must do more of that’ as certain techniques get forgotten overtime. It’s not only students that have memory problems 😉

Thanks again (love the site)

Ian McMaster

Brilliant, Paul:informed and informative, entertaining, provocative and funny. Not a bad combination. 😉 Particularly liked the ELF section although it’s true that ELF and Globish are not the same (but rather both variations of the loose term “International English”). Also especially liked the point that poor grammar hinders fluency, so that attention to grammar and attention to fluency are not a contradiction. And congrats to the BESIG online team for making this available to those of us who couldn’t get to the original talk.

Alex Case

My breakfast ended before the slideshow did, but what I read was very stimulating indeed. Reinforced my opinion that PPP does three things we should be doing, and it not leading to production of the actual target language of the day is neither suprising nor enough to dismiss doing all three Ps. By the same token, though, doing all three Ps in the same lesson – or even on every point we cover – is totally unnecessary. I generally prefer to do production in the next lesson and/ or production that links several points (including revision and/ or presentation of the next point).
I like to call production in the next lesson PPPP (presentation, practice, pause, production).

Cleve Miller

Excellent presentation Paul. Pity I couldn’t go to your session, but it was nice to see you in Stuttgart at Nick’s stand.

Your slides gave me a few ideas for my project as well.

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