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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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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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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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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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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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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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Correcting students' spoken errors in your CELTA lessons
Students all make mistakes, and it's important we respond to these. When students are speaking in class, and a teacher hears a mistake,...

Connor O'Donoghue
Sep 19, 20232 min read
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Checking students' understanding of meaning
One of the most important skills to learn as a new teacher is the skill of checking students' understanding. We might think we're...

Connor O'Donoghue
Sep 12, 20233 min read
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The 3 tools you need to master classroom management
Every lesson is essentially a sequence of activities. Activities come in all shapes and sizes, but ideally, they are student-centred, and...

Connor O'Donoghue
Jul 4, 20233 min read
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Why do students find listening so hard?
Students, even students who can speak, read and write well in English, often struggle with listening exercises in class, and there are...

Connor O'Donoghue
Jun 27, 20233 min read
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Vocabulary: conveying meaning to students
Learning new words is one of the most important parts of learning a new language. You may be able to get your meaning across with poor...

Connor O'Donoghue
Jun 20, 20233 min read
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How to teach speaking
Not all students are the same, but in most of the classes I've taught, when I've asked students what they want to do more of, speaking...

Connor O'Donoghue
Jun 5, 20234 min read
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