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Resilience: it’s tough, but so are teachers
Resilience is one of those ideas we recognise instantly: the ability to adapt, recover & keep going when things get difficult. In psychology, it’s understood as a dynamic process shaped by context, relationships & personal resources. TBH I’d never thought of it in the context of ELT in particular, but teacher resilience is concerned with…
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I swear it’s good English
How often do you swear in class? How often do your learners swear? We rarely bring taboo language into ELT, yet psycholinguistic research (Timothy Jay, 2009) suggests the average adult produces 60–90 swearwords a day, often without noticing. Teenagers tend to swear even more frequently & more purposefully, using taboo language as a tool for…
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Is phonemics phoney?
Most teachers will have heard of phonemic awareness, often shortened to phonemics. First explored in mid‑20th‑century psycholinguistics & later championed by researchers like Isabelle Liberman, it’s frequently touted as the key to helping children learn to read. The idea is simple: if learners can hear & manipulate the sounds inside words, decoding should follow. The…
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The universals that aren’t so universal
As teachers a large portion of our time is spent on rules. Helping learners uncover the rules that underly English, challenging the rules they’ve overgeneralised, & occasionally admitting that a rule isn’t really a rule at all. But step back from the classroom for a moment & a bigger question appears: how many of the…
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The wit instinct: the role of humour in the origin of language
What do we really think about humour? A bit of silly word‑play, a welcome distraction, a linguistic oddity that entertains but doesn’t do much heavy lifting? What if its role is far more consequential—woven into the very origins of grammar, cognition & human evolution itself? A new paper by Ljiljana Progovac (Wayne State University), published…
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The rise of the synthetic interlocutor
Teachers have long relied on information gaps, mingles & role-plays to get learners talking. These activities create movement, unpredictability & the kind of communicative pressure that gap-fills can’t. Role-play in particular has become a classroom staple: Ladousse popularised the term in ELT in the 1980s (with a book which was to be found on the…
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