Reflections on teaching EFL (1): task setting

Instruction checking questions (ICQs)

This is a core area of focus in initial teacher training courses. I'm sure a lot of teachers have strong opinions about ICQs and, rightly so, you can imagine that some students may find it patronising to be bombarded by these questions. 'The exercise is self-explanatory. Do you mean I haven't understood how many questions there are?'

Beyond the assessed lessons on teacher training courses, my response to whether ICQs should always be used is, not surprisingly, 'it depends'. The purpose of asking ICQs is to make sure that students have understood the forthcoming task or activity. Ollie, one of my CELTA trainers, put it nicely, 'ICQs are used to guide students towards completing a task or activity successfully.' I've seen confused students because of the lack of ICQs. I've also seen an excessive use of ICQs in assessed DELTA lessons, which feels redundant but which ticks the right boxes to get a Distinction for its own sake.

When should ICQs be used in real teaching? Before I decide whether to use ICQs, I consider both the task or activity itself and the students in my class. For tasks or activities with a straightforward format or type of responses, it may be better to let the students get on with their work. I sometimes anticipate the most likely student errors, in terms of task format or responses, and ask ICQs accordingly. 'Do you need to change the verb form?' This prevents students from copying the given verbs without engaging their brains.

If I'm teaching large groups of teenagers or university students, the use of ICQs helps me to set an appropriate tone in the classroom. For the weaker students, they can either confirm their understanding of my instructions or correct themselves. Most students don't really understand the purpose of ICQs - why would they? That's why I've decided to signpost it clearly with the phrase 'Just checking, ...' before I ask one. In online lessons, I nominate individual students to respond to my ICQs as everybody usually stays silent in order to avoid speaking over one another. This is less of a problem in face-to-face lessons as body language can be more easily read. I've realised that 'nominating for correct answers' does not apply here - it's relevant to checking answers in post-task feedback, not to eliciting responses to ICQs.

If I'm teaching one-to-one courses or small groups of business English students, I will check their understanding of complex tasks or activities such as role-play practice. 'Before we start, let's make sure ...' I've taught business English students who are senior managers of multinational corporations in Italy. You know, people with C-something-O job titles. If one or two students are struggling to understand what to do in a task or activity, they don't shy away from asking me directly. I think this is actually a more natural way of communicating with them. After all, we ask for clarifications and also clarify our messages in everyday life, don't we? The same logic goes for teaching one-to-one courses. Having said that, I still use the imperative structure and consciously keep teacher talk concise in my instructions.

Pairing or grouping of students

In the context of pair or group work, teachers can pair a stronger student with a weaker one, or ask two stronger or weaker students to work together. What is often missing in most discussions is the 'when' - when it would be more effective to use either grouping arrangement.

I find it helpful to consider whether a task or activity is closed and open.

In a closed task, the response to each question is either right or wrong. Most closed tasks are also individual tasks by nature. By pairing a stronger student with a weaker one, the faster finisher can help their pair partner after the individual part of a task. As the teacher, I can intervene and offer further help as needed.

In an open task such as spoken discussion or 'freer' language practice, there is no singular correct response. I've found it more effective to let two stronger or weaker students work with each other. In this arrangement, it's also easier for the teacher to offer the weaker pair(s) targeted support. When I tried the opposite way, the stronger student would often feel dissatisfied and the weaker one stressed because of frequent communication breakdowns.

I also consider other factors, such as rapport and personality. You'll be surprised that some teenagers still struggle to know all of their classmates' names after weeks of learning together in the same class. Unfortunately, this kind of cliquey group dynamics isn't always avoidable as students prefer to stick to their friends in pair or group work. Some of them may initially refuse to work with other classmates. The student-student rapport seems weak, which in turn affects the teacher-student rapport down the line. When I'm confronted with classes like this, I usually mix different students early on in the course so that they learn to work with different classmates. I also create plenty of opportunities for them to mingle with each other in personalised practice activities - beyond the first get-to-know-you (GTKY) lesson.

For students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), I've tried pairing them with their 'study buddy' in pair or group work. This is an idea I learnt from Dagmara Tanska's session on inclusive teaching (2025), in which she shared some strategies for teaching students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The way I identify study buddies is by observing which classmates a SEND student tends to get on with and work well with.

Demonstration and modelling

In my first few years of teaching, I relied on giving instructions verbally and underestimated the power of modelling a task or activity. Of course, it depends on task complexity and my students' familiarity with the task format. Most textbook activities are self-explanatory, but anything that involves visual or kinaesthetic elements lends themselves to task demonstration. Students are generally able to follow suit when they're shown a clear example of the target responses. In my experience, task demonstration works particularly well in Young Learner classes and with students at lower language levels as verbal explanation is likely to confuse matters.

I've also asked strong students to demonstrate communicative activities. Some students don't like being in the spotlight, whereas others may volunteer to model a task or activity with the teacher but struggle a bit 'on stage'. To prevent this from happening, I usually plan ahead and find an opportunity to talk to a strong student in the previous activity. 'Are you happy to demonstrate the next activity in front of the class with me?' I tell them what to do or say briefly. I also ask them whether they'd like to practise the task demonstration with me before the real thing.

Attention grabbing

My initial thoughts about attention grabbing were largely negative as I associated it with student misbehaviour. Why would the teacher need to grab their attention if they were already paying attention?

The longer I teach, the more I realise that attention grabbing is also related to turn taking. We cannot assume that students understand automatically it's the teacher's turn to speak. Attention grabbing is, therefore, an integral part of classroom-wide discourse management, if you like.

What attention grabbing signal works best? I think it's very much a personal choice. My go-to signal is the phrase 'thank you, everyone'. Please don't ask me why I keep thanking my students - this must have something to do with sociolinguistics. I've briefly tried using a desk bell, but some teachers find it patronising. In Young Learner classes, students may run to the bell and ring it for fun, which is actually counterproductive in terms of classroom management.

Chris Roland suggests using a mascot or toy animal with teenage learners - I'd say it works very well and saves the teacher's voice too. The louder the teacher shouts, the louder the students talk. His attention grabbing signal involves the teacher raising the mascot so that students know by the visual cue it's the teacher's turn to speak.

Learning by doing - and teaching

I was teaching several week-long English immersion courses at a local high school in outer Milan last month. The students and I met for three hours every morning, and there were more or less than 20 teenagers in each class. Their level was on average early B2 Upper-Intermediate.

In our lessons, the students explored teamwork, collaboration and communication through listening, reading and spoken discussions in English. For the final lesson, the students needed to complete a mini-project.

While spoken presentation is obviously the go-to option for the mini-project, I decided to experiment with something different in my final week. Adding to their spoken presentations, the students needed to design an activity, which involves teamwork, collaboration and communication (in English), for their classmates. Not only did they have to talk about the above three topics, but each group of students also took turns to be the 'teacher' in planning and running their own activity. The rest of the class, of course, had the opportunity to put theory into practice.

It might be a bold move, but the students did very well. One group came up with a problem-solving puzzle that involves moving a wolf, a sheep and cabbage across the river; another group designed a revision task (with material!) modelled on what the class had done on good and bad teamwork. Finally, a tech-savvy group of students designed a Kahoot quiz to revise what they had learnt about teamwork, collaboration and communication.

What better way to learn something than by doing (and teaching) it?

Pronunciation - Form or Form - Pronunciation? / Written - Spoken or Spoken - Written?

Reflections: MPF or MFP?

Why do CELTA tutors tell trainee teachers that they should follow MPF (meaning - pronunciation - form) in that order when clarifying language?

In terms of learning, does it matter whether the EFL teacher chooses an MPF procedure over MFP as in Guided Discovery tasks?

After teaching vocabulary to a group of YLs aged 8 and 9 this morning, I noticed some evident differences between the two clarification procedures.

I was teaching the word Poseidon, which is pronounced /pəsaɪdən/ in RP English. Despite drilling it several times and breaking it down into individual syllables, once my students saw the written form (i.e. spelling / orthography) of the word, some of them  came up with all sorts of pronunciations. I heard pole-say-dawn, pole-see-dawn or pole-side-dawn in the subsequent practice activities. No matter how many times I corrected certain students, there was still a tendency for some of them to creep back to their L1 habits.

What does this say about decoding and encoding a word? The MPF procedure ensures that language learners keep to the spoken form of a word until its pronunciation is more or less firmly lodged in their short-term memory. In an ideal world, it is at this point that they can move on to the written form of the word.

(There are exceptions to the MPF procedure for clarifying language, but this renders another blog post.)

Reflections: Written - Spoken or Spoken - Written?

What does this say about the order of language practice activities then?

In the context of teaching VYLs and YLs, the order is thus spoken practice before written practice. Note that this is different to what trainee teachers are taught on the CELTA, which is written (controlled) practice followed by spoken (controlled - freer) practice.

If we apply the Spoken - Written concept to staging practice activities, there should be plenty of spoken practice before the learners start writing a word or grammatical structures. More importantly, VYLs and YLs don't learn a language by reading and writing it; listening and speaking always happen first in real life.

(In a related blog post, I'm going to mention some extended practice activities in the context of teaching YLs.)

Making the hangman game more student-centred

It came about from a spontaneous idea when I was teaching earlier this afternoon. It was with a group of Pre-Intermediate young teens - we were working on vocabulary on the topic of 'food' (ways of cooking, to be precise).

The students were doing a matching task with visuals. Based on what I've seen, most students usually struggle with 'oven', 'pan' and 'saucepan' (word and pronunciation), which were shown by the visuals on the coursebook page. So I decided to devise a hangman game on the spot. From my past observations, this game tends to be teacher-centred in that each student would be given a turn to say a letter while others would sit around and wait for their turn.

With that in mind, I was thinking of ways of making the hangman game more student-centred. Why couldn't my students have the answers and let their classmates guess the word?

• I drew an oven, a (frying) pan and a saucepan on the whiteboard.
• I wrote the answers on pieces of paper.
• I gave each student a piece of paper with the answer. (like an information-gap activity)
  
• I asked my students to copy what was on the whiteboard.
• I let my students play the hangman game in groups.

The result? Compared to the lockstep, teacher-fronted format, the level of student engagement was much higher. It generated some excitement among my students when they were down to the last chance. Poor hangman - two casualties and two close calls!

Hybrid lessons: a laptop and a speaker

It all started with an email this morning - one of the students ('Student G') had to remain in self-isolation due to pandemic regulations, and she would join the afternoon lesson online from home.

Despite my modest knowledge of the hybrid classroom/lesson, I'd never taught one up to this point. So I spent the whole morning trying to visualise the logistics in the classroom and think through a number of key questions in my head. How would my students be working together? What would Student G need so that she could follow our lesson successfully? How could I make sure the sound was all right for all students? How would I deal with unexpected issues with technology? Where should I place my laptop?

In the end, I decided to do it like this:

 

(Note that I'm using Student G as a kind of 'hyponym' of those who join an in-person lesson synchronously from their home.)

• I put the lesson's digital material (handouts and information-gap task cards) in a shared folder on OneDrive, so that I could share the link with Student G prior to the lesson.
  (N.B. The material is numbered 1 to 4 for easy reference.)
  
  
• I place my laptop in such a way that the webcam could capture all students working in the classroom. I also projected the online meeting on the classroom's television, so that all students could see Student G.
  
  
• I connected my laptop to a stereo speaker and set the audio at a level which was audible but wasn't intrusive, so that all students could hear Student G talking and vice versa.

 

What worked well: some reflections

• Instructions - clear, succinct instructions with the usual checking questions work just as well as in any online or in-person lesson. In a hybrid lesson, however, it would be a good idea to 'chest' the material for Student G in front of the webcam (hold it for a few seconds) before moving back to the physical classroom. It also helps when eye contact is made with both Student G and other students when giving instructions.
  
  
  
• Arrangement (pairwork and groupwork) - once the laptop is set up at a stationary place, it would be easy for any student to move to the 'workstation' space for pairwork. Groupwork might be tricky depending on pandemic regulations and how many people one can fit in front of a webcam. As usual, it would work better by moving the students to a new type of arrangement before giving instructions. (In our case, it was convenient because we had worked on Can you + verb (base form)? a couple of weeks before. Student A, can you move here? Thank you.) I also asked my students to speak up when they were working with Student G, even though the laptop's microphone was able to pick up my voice from afar. (N.B. The online meeting's noise cancellation setting was put on its lowest.)
  
   
• Attention spread - I got this useful tip from one of the webinars I've attended. (A big thank you to those teachers who shared their experience of teaching hybrid lessons!) Generally speaking, there is a tendency for the teacher to focus on either Student G or other students for the extended period of time. When I was teaching this hybrid lesson, I tried eliciting answers directly from Student G (Yes, Student G?) as well as the rest of the class (with a follow-up question: Student G, do you agree?). Similarly, this technique was applied to post-task feedback giving.
  
  
  
• Listening - to avoid issues with echo, I muted the laptop's microphone while I was sharing sound with Student G in the online meeting. This worked smoothly since other students were able to listen to the audio through the stereo speaker at the same time.
  

What could have been better

• Monitoring - It felt as though I wasn't monitoring Student G sufficiently, but it was the noticeable difference between the in-person and the online modes which created this false impression. In a hybrid lesson, post-task pair check will take on greater importance since it represents the crucial moment for monitoring Student G's answers. Another useful monitoring tool is the chat in the online meeting, which I'm going to address in the post-task feedback.

• Post-task feedback - I had to rely on whoever was working with Student G to make sure she had the correct answers. I've also thought about other means of giving Student G feedback: chat, virtual board, screen sharing the answer key, showing the whiteboard through the webcam or Teacher Talk. Given its bad reputation, Teacher Talk may sound less desirable, but it is actually less time-consuming than other means of giving feedback on a shorter lesson task - and it is purposeful Teacher Talk. Screen sharing the answer key would be useful if the lesson task is longer or the answers more complex. The reason why I decided not to use the chat was that it would have effectively meant I needed to give the same feedback twice (physical whiteboard and chat), but I'm open to different opinions.
  
  
• Technology - my students and I did with bare essentials - a laptop and a stereo speaker. What would have been better was a second camera/webcam facing the physical whiteboard directly, but it wasn't too time-consuming to rotate my laptop.
  

Teaching YLs: a more refined take on student-centredness

I was teaching animals (vocabulary) with can/can't (grammar) to a group of 9- to 11-year-olds.

It started off with the idea of engaging my students at the planning stage. (Yes, it's always been my nightmare to have a group of bored faces who would zone out during the lesson!) As I was delivering the in-person lesson, I noticed a  special vibe which I had never experienced in all other previous YL classes. It was akin to the concept of 'flow' by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Finding Flow (New York: Perseus, 1998) - wonderful to take a back seat and see the whole class of YLs working so calmly in pairs.

Looking back on the lesson, I've identified what particularly worked well:

Warm-up routine

I've been a language learner and there were occasions on which I wished I'd had the chance to get to know certain classmates. Hence I decided to use 'rings of circle' as both a GTKY activity in the first lesson and a warm-up routine.

The student-to-student rapport was overall excellent. We continued building on the familiar routine of standing in two rings of circle, so that everybody has the chance of talking to each other through rotation and turning towards each other.

Presentation of vocabulary

I realised that whenever I mimed along with flashcards, it was always me, the teacher, who imposed the actions on my students.

What I did this morning was that I elicited the mime of each animal from individual students. Then other students followed their classmates, which worked wonderfully.

(Thanks to my colleague, teacher S, for guiding me on drawing flashcards with a marker pen. Teacher development for next year: learn how to draw?) 

 

Practice of vocabulary and grammar: guess which animal

Team games worked well. For vocabulary, an individual student had to mime the animal while the teams compete against each other in writing the answer most quickly. (N.B. One benefit of not having gone for 'saying the answer aloud' is that it might be harder for the teacher to judge who have raised their hands most quickly.)

For grammar, a representative of each team was given the same animal. They went back to their teammates, who had to ask them 'Can you + verb?' (questions). The representative could only answer 'Yes, I can' or 'No, I can't', and their teammates needed to guess the animal as quickly as they could.

I ended up showing the answer once by accident - didn't hide it well in front of my students. They were honest enough to tell me, so each team earned a point!

 

Positive points system

The implication of catching YLs being good is that I've started giving points to the well-behaved opposite team when a student started misbehaving. (The key word is 'opposite'.)

I've also started using the points system more consistently when grabbing students' attention for giving instructions, asking students to tidy up/put things away, etc. 2 points are sometimes given to the 'good' team, whereas the 'bad' team still get 1 point if they are just a bit slower.

Teaching grammar: self-checking questions

Concept Checking Questions (CCQs) are undoubtedly a term familiar to any teacher who has completed a TEFL training course. We ask CCQs to make sure our students have fully understood a lesson's target language, so that they won't fossilise erroneous assumptions which may later contribute to all sorts of errors (e.g. interpretative, strategic, stylistic, etc.) in their language production.

I believe, however, CCQs aren't limited to the domain of EFL teachers. Our students can make good use of them too.

I was tapping into my personal experience of learning German noun, adjective and article endings. Like many German learners who use English as the referential anchor, I always joked we had it much simpler than the 'infinite' number of German cases and endings. Nevertheless, it is my German teacher, Beate, who I have to thank for helping me attain mastery of this system. (I'm still making loads of mistakes because of noun gender, but that's another story.) She explained how it works by giving me four self-checking questions.

For those of you interested in the self-checking questions, here they are:

1. What gender is the singular/plural noun?
2. Is there an article in the sentence? (Do we need one?)
3. If there is an article, does it already carry the gender ending?
4. What case is the object noun in the sentence?

Gestern habe ich ein blaues Fahrrad gekauft. [I bought a blue bicycle yesterday.]

1. Fahrrad is a neutral noun. It is singular in this sentence.
2. We need an article because Fahrrad is singular countable.
3. The indefinite article ein is not inflected; it can signal either the masculine or neutral gender.
4. Fahrrad is in the akkusativ, not dativ, case because of the verb gekauft. The indefinite article ein is sufficient (eines is in the genetive case), but we have the adjective blaues, which carries the -es netural gender ending.

After using these self-checking questions for a gazillion times, I have internalised the entire system to the point of reducing my formulation ('thinking') time down to less than a mere second! In other words, it has become an automatised process for me in speaking and writing.

If we transfer the above learning experience to the English language, teachers may be able to go a step further by giving their students self-checking questions where appropriate. In turn, the students can ask such questions outside the classroom, which would enable them to move closer towards internalising the use of a target language. To this end, collaborative 'guided discovery' tasks with checking questions (CCQs) are a great teaching tool.

Teaching prefixes: mental associations

What's your 30-second story about a word?

It was an improvised idea which worked well with a C1 (Advanced) group of General English adult learners.

We were using a coursebook graded article about a hotel as the langauge input. Halfway through teaching the lesson, the word 'preposterous' suddenly came to my mind. I started pondering how this word had became stuck in my mind. Then I figured out it was the sound of which I've formed strong mental associations - the way how Sir John Gielgud said this word in the screen adaptation of Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance. My brain immediately evokes the image of Sir John, who played the role of Aaron Jastrow, saying this word in a disapproving tone. (The other words are 'mischance' and 'misjudgement' which come from Jastrow's final diary entry.)

Tapping into my personal experience of forming associations with words, I decided to ask my students to choose a word with prefix and tell the class about their mental associations with it. (When did they first come to know the word? What was the occasion?)

It worked well - two students picked the same word by chance! This was an excellent example which illustrates how each of us forms highly personal mental associations even with the same word.

Exam strategies: happy student, happy teacher

I was preparing a student for his CAE (C1 Advanced) in a fortnight.

In Reading (Part 7), candidates are given an article and have to complete gapped paragraphs.

This particular student was struggling a bit in the last lesson, so I came up with two different strategies which he subsequently applied to his homework. EUREKA! When we checked homework earlier today, he got all answers correct. What's more - he had done it under exam conditions!

I'd like to share my two strategies here:

• developing an overall structure of the text - thinking about the main idea of each paragraph (with the aid of topic sentences)
  
  N.B. There's a logical progression of such 'main ideas' in the text, so that candidates can deduce what goes in each gap.
  
  
• lexical references - using them to verify answers, focusing on the cohesion between the previous and the subsequent paragraphs
  

The 'New Normal': online, face-to-face or hybrid EFL/ESL lessons?

It's a dynamic concept. There have been lots of talking about a 'new normal' in the UK, but nobody really knows what to expect. An array of contextual lexis has cropped up: remote teaching, online learning, working from home (Italians use the term 'smart working'), socially distanced, social distancing, and so on.

For ELT or, more specifically, EFL/ESL, the past few months of online teaching and learning has definitely left its mark on teaching techniques and the wider discussion of 'post-digital ELT' (if I can describe it as such) methods/approaches.

These are some possible scenarios:

• fully online
• fully face-to-face with social distancing in place
• a hybrid mode: face-to-face and online with various degrees of flexibility
  

Every teacher has their own preference, but I believe this discussion should focus on learning contexts. Of course, a flat screen will never beat face-to-face interactions - I'm thinking about paralinguistics here. And it'd be nice for both the teacher and the learners to have the peace of mind that their next-door neighbours aren't going to inadvertently cause disruptions to the online classroom.

Putting the teacher's preferences aside, I'd say the most effective online lessons are those with one-to-one and small groups up to four students. If technological innovations allow teachers to monitor two or more groups simultaneously, then this will provide the case for having larger classes.

Then there's the flipped classroom approach. It's part of the Blended Learning method and compatible with both online and face-to-face lessons.

Synchronous and asynchronous learning theories are more relevant to the post-lockdown hybrid mode of EFL/ESL lessons. What if a student can't physically come to the lesson? What if half of the class have face-to-face lessons while the other half join the same lesson via videoconferencing? This is going to be a curious experiment for 2020-21 and I shall look forward to hearing ideas and reflections from others.

Teaching - not Testing - Listening

This is going to be a quick post. I've just finished teaching a General English adult lesson online. The lesson's topic was 'I wish' (now) and we used Unit 12A from face2face (Intermediate), 2nd ed. Something interesting came into my mind as I was setting up the lead-in activity. I then decided to change my plan and improvised a bit on the spot, while I was thinking about the flow of activities all the time.

The original plan went like this - the very standard CELTA way:

1. a lead-in where I showed my students a visual of 'Aladdin and the Genie'; they had to tell each other 3 individual wishes (in groups)
2. pre-teach vocabulary: informal phrases on the topic of wishes and desire
   
3. pre-listening task: my students would guess what the 5 pairs of people were talking about from 5 photos
4. listening for 'gist': match 5 conversations to the 5 photos
5. scan listening for specific words: gap-fill (marker sentences)

I first came across the following blog post when I was on my CELTA training: Teaching listening - tweaking the CELTA approach. It has made me question my 'convenient' way of running listening activities in the classroom. I've already explored ways to develop my students' listening skills, including focusing on certain speech features which they struggle with, predicting the type of answers prior to a task, starting and stopping (repeating several times), and listening with the script to connect sound to spelling.

Now, I decided against disrupting the flow of 'wishes and desire' by having a pre-teach vocabulary for the sake of it, the lead-in (#1) naturally leads to the pre-listening task (#3). I then ran the 'gist' listening task (#4), in which my students wouldn't be required to understand the 'blocking vocabulary' in order to complete it successfully. After that, I ran an extended stage of pre-teaching vocabulary (#2): peer teaching, clarification, followed by a practice activity (dialogue Q&A: find something in common). Finally, we returned to the scan listening task (#5); at this point, my students should have understood all the pre-taught phrases in the recording.

The time between the two listening tasks was wide apart. Has any other teacher ever adopted this path/framework when they gave a language lesson with listening?

The Great Shift: Teaching and Learning Online

These are some upcoming webinars on synchronous and asynchronous learning:

• Oxford University Press - https://elt.oup.com/events/global/synchronous-teaching-your-first-online-lesson?cc=it&selLanguage=en&mode=hub

• Macmillan - https://www.macmillanenglish.com/us/training-events/events-webinars/event/thom-kiddle-principles-and-practices-in-asynchronous-online-learning

There are excellent blog posts by Sandy Millin on teaching communicative English lessons online:

• Sandy Millin's blog post (14 March 2020) - https://sandymillin.wordpress.com/2020/03/14/ideas-for-adapting-group-lessons-to-working-on-zoom/ 

Reflecting on my first-hand experiences

Many things have been written or said about 'how to use (an online platform)' and exploiting various functions for lesson activities, such as chat, file sharing (worksheets and activity role cards), screen sharing, breakout rooms, virtual whiteboard, and so on. I'm not going to repeat them in this post.

I'd rather like to share some less discussed aspects of teaching online:

Tech check - training the learners

• It's not a bad idea to spend 5 to 10 minutes of the first online lesson on tech check. Students get to try out various functions one by one. The idea is to let them become familiar with a new online platform.

Look at the bottom of your screen. Do you see the menu bar? Click on 'Chat'.

If you're on a smartphone, click on 'Participants'. Then you'll see 'Chat'.

• This is a good opportunity to lower learner anxiety substantially. Progress is often made more quickly once everybody is comfortable with the new classroom environment.

• Another nice warmer would be a communicative activity (information gap/exchange) - with the language that a particular group of students is already able to produce. This provides further opportunities for them to get used to communicating over their webcams.

Expectation management

• Bear in mind we always use visual clues to formulate ideas of what a person is doing. A small webcam window, however, gives us greatly reduced clues. Markers of intention can fill the expectation gap, so that everybody knows they're waiting purposefully but not aimlessly.

I'm going to share my screen with you. 

In a moment, you'll see three photos on your screen.

• Is everybody waiting for everybody else to start talking? Students can actually be trusted with their turn-taking and self-control abilities. Once set up properly, the teacher as the moderator can stay muted in discussions and brainstorming activities. Students talk among themselves and the teacher intervenes only when necessary. 

• Stop webcam is another useful function when you play videos and/or audio using screen share. Students can be told about your intention before they start. This can minimise distractions and the teacher can take a breather!

Over and out, more on this later!

IELTS preparation

Apart from the usual 'compare your answers' (pair check), here are some ideas of how you could make IELTS preparation lessons communicative:

Listening

• Discuss a list of test strategies - valid or not valid?

• Discuss and justify predictions about some test questions, e.g. gap-fill and multiple choice

Reading

• Jigsaw reading - piece an article together (different paragraphs or sections of the article)

• Discuss and justify predictions about some test questions, e.g. multiple choice

Writing

• Writing Task 1 - work together to identify key features of the given visual(s), or even collaborative writing

• Writing Task 2 - brainstorm ideas and discuss/select ideas for writing

Speaking

• Discuss a list of test strategies - what's valid and what's not
  
• Discuss and justify predictions about some test questions, e.g. gap-fill and multiple choice