Teaching English Radio

Today I wanted to mention a section of the Teaching English website.  (Another of the sites I'm subscribed to and visit regularly.


Teaching English Radio

There are 15 minute radio programmes on a particular theme.

9 themes have been covered so far:

1  Planning your lessons
2  Teachers supporting each other
3  Finding and creating worksheets
4  Using group work in larger classes
5  Pair and group work in practice
6  Developing teachers' language
7  Using English in the classroom
8  Teaching new language
9  Teaching reading

Then, they can download a worksheet which summarises the ideas discussed in the radio programme and also contains some ideas for thinking about/discussing.  For example, this is the Programme Summary from  Finding and creating worksheets:

Programme Summary: Using real-life materials is motivating for students. It provides a very real context for practising English. Our students are also a rich resource as we found out in this programme.

Teachers can use songs, humour, real objects and simple drawings and if we need to find colourful images for posters or flash cards we can cut them out of magazines. Newspapers are a very cheap resource and provide material for craft, as well as a variety of written texts. We hope you’ve heard some ideas to adapt for your teaching situation                                                                                                    .

These programmes would provide great material and stimulus for teacher training and development.  They would also provide useful language input for trainees.

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British Council Seminar on choosing and using resources

Yesterday, I received my weekly newsletter from British Council Teaching English.  (Another site I'm subscribed to).

If I have time, I look through the areas mentioned in the newsletter as soon as it arrives and click on the links to find out more about them.  (If not, the email gets transferred to my 'subscriptions' folder

and stays there till I have time to look at it properly!)

I decided to have a look at the email this morning when I switched on my computer and clicked on the link to

Choosing and using resources with ESOL learners Dot Powell, manager of the British Council's project to create a portal for ESOL teachers and learners, looks at criteria we use to make judgements about ESOL materials.

This took me to the Seminars section of the Teaching English website.  I clicked on:

I then watched Dot Powell, Project Manager for ESOL Nexus in a seminar with teachers discussing the criteria we need to apply when we are choosing and/or preparing resources for students.

Dot then provided examples of resources and applied the criteria with the teachers at the seminar.


The seminar lasts just under 20 minutes, but I found it so interesting and well-presented, that the time just flew by.

I then paid a quick visit to the ESOL Nexus website.

The site is targeted at a particular group of ESOL learners:

ESOL Nexus Welcome to the ESOL Nexus page for learners. The materials here have been specially designed and identified for learners who are working and making their home in the UK. We are sure you will find lots of interesting and motivating activities here which will help you to improve your English in lots of different ways, understand more about UK culture and learn more about UK society and work.

But I have just tried out a couple of activities from the site and I think that many of them would be useful and relevant to our students.
There are many listening activities and the Magazine articles seem interesting.
I liked the several of the poems in the Poems and Stories section.  I hadn't come across the No poem before!

I hope you will visit the Nexus site too and find it useful.  (Most of the stuff there is for higher level learners.

In a few minutes, I will look at the teachers section of the site - maybe for a future post......?


The British Council has lots more seminars on its website.  Here is the direct link to the start up page.

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