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How to Teach Present Perfect (Without Confusing Everyone)
What Is the Present Perfect? The present perfect is one of those grammar points that can confuse both students and teachers. Is it...

Connor O'Donoghue
Jul 224 min read
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How to Teach Better Speaking Lessons: Tips for New English Teachers
For many English learners, speaking fluently and confidently is the ultimate goal. While reading, writing, and listening matter, most...

Connor O'Donoghue
Jul 153 min read
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Eliciting: A Key Technique in Language Teaching
As a new English teacher, one of the most valuable skills you need to develop is the ability to ask the right questions. Eliciting, the...

Connor O'Donoghue
Jul 15 min read
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How to Use the Whiteboard Effectively on CELTA (and Beyond)
If you’re preparing for teaching practice on your CELTA course , or just starting out as an English language teacher, one of the tools...

Connor O'Donoghue
Jun 175 min read
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How to plan a first lesson with a new class
Starting with a new group as a teacher should be fun, but it's very understandable that new teachers are nervous when thinking about a...

Connor O'Donoghue
May 204 min read
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Language Grading: Do you need to simplify what you say when teaching English?
What does 'grade your language' mean? On a teacher training course like CELTA , new trainee teachers are often advised to grade their...

Connor O'Donoghue
Apr 294 min read
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Student Engagement - generating interest in English lessons
What is student engagement? When we teach, we need to make sure students are engaged. Some people think that this means that we need to...

Connor O'Donoghue
Apr 233 min read
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How do you teach English through English?
Can you really teach English without knowing students' first language? When I tell people that I've taught English in ten different...

Connor O'Donoghue
Apr 83 min read
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Six tips for improving your timing in your CELTA lessons
Some handy tips to help improve your timing when planning and teaching CELTA lessons

Connor O'Donoghue
Apr 13 min read
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How to Teach English One-to-One
Should I be scared of teaching one-to-one? When a new teacher starts teaching, they sometimes get asked to teach English one-to-one and...

Connor O'Donoghue
Mar 253 min read
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Interaction Patterns in the English Language Classroom
Teaching English is different from teaching maths or teaching geography because English is a language and this means that practising...

Connor O'Donoghue
Apr 9, 20243 min read
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Helping students to record vocabulary
On a CELTA course, we spend a long time looking at what happens in the lesson itself. How do we get the meaning of a word across to our...

Connor O'Donoghue
Mar 17, 20243 min read
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Deciding when to deviate from a lesson plan
New teachers can sometimes cling to a plan, and there are good reasons for this. A lesson plan is your roadmap. The final stage of a...

Connor O'Donoghue
Jan 9, 20243 min read
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Planning a series of lessons
By the end of a CELTA course, you should be very good at planning an individual lesson, but you might feel intimidated at the idea of...

Connor O'Donoghue
Nov 28, 20233 min read
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Teaching Mixed-level English Classes: Five Top Tips
In a dream world, every student in a class is exactly the same level - they all know the same words as each other, they are all equally...

Connor O'Donoghue
Nov 13, 20234 min read
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How to teach advanced students
New teachers can be intimidated by advanced students - "What if they know more about grammar than I do?" "What if they correct my...

Connor O'Donoghue
Oct 31, 20233 min read
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Teacher Talking Time: How can we reduce it?
For many new trainee teachers on their first CELTA course, one of the first and most frequent action points that they get told to work on...

Connor O'Donoghue
Oct 24, 20233 min read
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What is controlled practice?
Part of learning anything is to practise it. When I was a teenager and I learned to drive in Ireland in the 1990s, my father took me to...

Connor O'Donoghue
Oct 17, 20233 min read
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Five top tips for writing a CELTA lesson plan
When we meet people at the end of their CELTA courses, one of the comments they often make is that they didn't realise just how much time...

Connor O'Donoghue
Oct 3, 20233 min read
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Receptive skills tasks for the English language classroom
Reading and listening are known as the 'receptive skills' because we receive language while reading and listening. The other language...

Connor O'Donoghue
Sep 27, 20233 min read
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