Dust & Water

From one we come and to one we shall return.

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Planning Learning on Multiple Levels

Planning Learning on Multiple Levels

I recently met with some teachers from a nearby language centre for an informal chat and to give them some guidance and ideas to develop themselves and their institution.

The primary reason we met was because a colleague of mine mentioned that the language centre was without a senior teacher / academic director, and the teachers were feeling a little aimless and disordered.

I went along to see…

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JLA TEACHING CERTIFICATE JANUARY 2018

JLA TEACHING CERTIFICATE JANUARY 2018

Start the year with your best foot forward by getting your TESOL Certificate with Jakarta Language Academy.

And where better to do it than the STUNNING Indonesian Island of Bali, known to the locals as Island of the Gods!

Contact JLA today to find out more and to register…

[email protected]

([phone] (Call, Text, WhatsApp)

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Teacher Talk Time Round Up (III)

Teacher Talk Time Round Up (III)

At the end of September, the Teacher Talk Community met up for the third monthly Teacher Talk Time. For this session, we went with something a little bit different. In the first two meetings, we chose themes related to teaching approaches and methodology, and these will continue to be our main focus, but last month we got together to talk about the differences and interplay between Native and…

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What is education and what is it for?

What is education and what is it for?

This might seem like a stupid question on the face of it. We all know what education is, you might think. And I think to some degree that’s probably a fair claim. We all know what education is because we’ve all experienced it. We could all point to it and say, “Look, that’s education”. However, I’m not sure that what we understand as education based on our experience is really the best example of…

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On Teaching "Those Students"

On Teaching “Those Students”

Today I came across this post on LinkedIn with a good number of “likes” and only assenting comments.

While I appreciate the underlying sentiment here, I do think it’s a little  dishonest. And to be clear, I don’t mean that I disbelieve that the original poster truly feels this way. But people get a lot of praise for writing things like this about teachers and education, and I think it’s…

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On Native and Non-native Teacher Equality

On Native and Non-native Teacher Equality

  It feels cheap to start this article with a list of caveats, but it also feels necessary. During my career as a teacher (9 years in so far, so not a lifetime, but far from negligible), I have experienced teaching in a number of different types of institution alongside both Native and Non-native Speaker EFL Teachers. In the last few years, I have worked both explicitly and implicitly to promote…

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Programmes from JLA Contact Us Now to Enquire about Our Latest Programmes and Offers Karl Millsom Founder, Academic Director & Lead Trainer [email protected]

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On Progress or the Lack Thereof

On Progress or the Lack Thereof

Why Education Stagnates

A colleague recently asked me a particularly interesting question, the answer to which I had held in my head for quite some time but had never really verbalised before. As such, I wasn’t able to express myself as clearly as I would have liked at the time, so this post is an attempt to clarify that response. I’ll paraphrase the question first:

Why do teachers and schools…

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Teaching–Learning Structure for Productive and Receptive Skills, Part III

Teaching–Learning Structure for Productive and Receptive Skills, Part III

This is the final part of this short series of posts. The previous post focused on how to structure lessons focused on the productive skills, speaking and listening. In this post, I shall outline the same for receptive skills, reading and listening.

Developing Receptive Skills

There are many things different about receptive skills when compared with productive skills. I will talk about purpose…

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Teaching–Learning Structure for Productive and Receptive Skills, Part II

Teaching–Learning Structure for Productive and Receptive Skills, Part II

In my last post, I introduced the idea of learning processes for productive and receptive skills within the lesson structure that I had previously written about, here.

This post will continue the concept, focusing specifically on an effective structure for developing the productive skills, that’s speaking and writing.

Developing Productive Skills

When we choose to develop a productive skill,…

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Teaching–Learning Structure for Productive and Receptive Skills, Part I

Teaching–Learning Structure for Productive and Receptive Skills, Part I

I have written before about Lesson Planning. I have talked at length about constructing learning objectives here and here, and I have given some ideas for a function-based approach to lesson planning. In that last article, I advocated for beginning the planning process with focus skillsand practical functions in mind. In this short series, I want to look at the structure of the teaching–learning…

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NOW OFFERING: On-Demand Lesson Observations

NOW OFFERING: On-Demand Lesson Observations

  One of the greatest sources of professional development for teachers is regular lesson observations and constructive feedback. If you’re lucky, your institution provides this as standard, but MANY TEACHERS ARE NOT SO LUCKY. Many teachers go for YEARS without being observed in their classroom.

Until now, I have only conducted lesson observations of teachers who work for me or who train for me.…

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The JLA Lesson Structure

The JLA Lesson Structure

Many of the posts that I have written on this blog so far deal with specific parts of the lesson planning process or specific scenarios encountered in the teaching process. All of these different elements, however, are components of an overarching structure, which is what I’ll be writing about here.

This post will introduce and describe the lesson structure that I use when I teach and that I…

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Project Update

A few months ago I wrote that I would be trying to write 1000 words a day in an attempt to get some solid content up on here and to keep my creativity consistent. I kept up with that fairly well, and while not all of my work ended up on this blog, some 80% or so probably did.

For the last few weeks though, you might have noticed a distinct lack of posts on here. The reason for this is not that I…

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Workshop: A Practical Approach to Teaching Language

Workshop: A Practical Approach to Teaching Language

One-Day Workshop for English Teachers

9am Saturday, 29 July – South Jakarta

The new school year is just around the corner, so now is the perfect time to start thinking about how you can give your students the best this year.

Students, parents and teachers are becoming increasingly aware of the changing professional and academic environment that students are graduating into.

It is now more…

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A Brief Interlude: My Daughter

A Brief Interlude: My Daughter

My daughter, the tiny woman that I gave life to, is going to be strong. She is going to be confident and self assured, and she is going to know what she is worth. You can teach her to be meek, to be quiet, to be subservient, but she will not learn that from me. You can teach her that the way to be a good girl is to put up with disrespect, to accept being ignored and treated as less than the next…

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Choosing Focus Skills

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