Blog topics for July and August 2019

Find the latest blog topics for July and August 2019 and take a look at some interesting posts from the last two months.

For some of us, we are coming to the end of a school year, but for others, we are still in full swing! With that in mind, our topics for July and August take a look at adjusting assessment, activities to end a school year, how to include a focus on 21st century skills and helping learners develop strategies for listening. Find them below.

But first, for the last two months, our bloggers have been writing a range of insightful posts on our May and June topics, covering the value of festivals lessons, introducing learning strategies, the benefits of peer observations and your preferred digital tools to promote autonomous learning. 

Festivals are ever popular and a number of you wrote about how lesser known festivals and unusual celebrations can bring culture into the classroom and provide many opportunities for language development and projects, with plenty of practical examples. A very useful post talked about how to introduce learning strategies from the very first lesson by discussing learner expectations.

Some of you looked at the importance of peer observation, sharing stories of what you've taken away from observing colleagues and how it changed your teaching from then on for the better. Finally, digital tools generated a lot of posts, and there were a range of ideas for using tools such as Readlang, WhatsApp, Edmodo and others to promote autonomous learning outside the classroom. 

Many thanks to all our bloggers! Read some of the highlights from May and June here:

Madhu Tiwari | Exploring Cultural diversity in language classroom

NinaMK | Festivals of Other Countries in an EL Lesson

Theodora Papapanagiotou | Weird celebrations in the classroom? Why not?

Zahra_Zuhair | Celebrating Traditions

Alexei Kiselev | “Myth busting” discussion helping to develop learning strategies

Rossana | Biggest take away from classroom observation

Sulaiman Jenkins | The benefits of peer classroom observations

AR | Readlang to the rescue

Ingrid Mosquera Gende | Powtoon: introducing cartoon videos in the classroom

Karina Castro | The ‘superpowers’ of the graphic novel

Madhu Tiwari | Using digital tools in the classroom

Raquel Ribeiro | Instagram during classes

S.Akilandeswari | WhatsApp and English teaching-learning

Topics for July and August 2019

Topic 1

Sometimes traditional forms of assessment do not allow an individual learner to demonstrate the progress they have made. Think of a time you have felt that a learner needed to be assessed in a different way. How did you adjust the assessment to meet their needs? If you weren't allowed to adjust the assessment, how would you have liked to have done?

Topic 2

As the school year comes to an end in many parts of the world, we often use activities to help students reflect on their learning, or 'fun' end of year activities. What do you normally do at the end of a school year? What activities have you used succesfully, or unsuccessfully?

Topic 3

With 21st century skills now a common feature in many syllabuses and coursebooks, how do you ensure there is a focus on these in your classrooms? How do you help students gain leadership skills, for example? What do you do to foster creativity and collaboration? How can areas like citizenship be brought into the English language classroom? 

Topic 4

Listening in a foreign language is one of the most challenging skills to master. How do you approach listening tasks and activities? What do you do to ensure your students actually develop strategies for listening in a foreign language more effectively? 

Research and insight

Browse fascinating case studies, research papers, publications and books by researchers and ELT experts from around the world.

See our publications, research and insight