Chia Suan Chong

175 POSTS

Chia Suan Chong blogged for English Teaching professional for 8 years, every fortnight, writing her final post back in September 2019. During her time as a blogger, she wrote 173 blog posts, writing from 5 different cities Ã¢â‚¬â€œ through holidays, through changes in her career, through 3 periods of maternity leave. She took on different roles as she continued to blog as a teacher, a teacher trainer, a communication skills trainer, an intercultural skills trainer, a writer, a freelancer and an educator and her blogs reflected those experiences as well as discussing controversial and topic issues in ELT and reporting back from conferences. Fascinated by the interplay between culture, language and thought, Chia is now an intercultural skills trainer, materials developer and author. She continues to write for Pavilion ELTÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s magazines and had a long-running column in ETp called "Not Only But Also". She is also the author of Successful International Communication (published by Pavilion Publishing and Media, 2018), and is now based in York.

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5 ways of using corpora to develop learner autonomy

2016-02-18

In her blog this week, Chia Suan Chong explains how she uses a corpus in the classroom to aid teaching and learning...

Plate or bowl? – How language affects our perception

2016-02-05

The results of Chia Suan Chong's crowdsourcing question on social media get her thinking about language and how we see the world.

Fact or Myth? Five questions to think about in ELT

2016-02-05

Myths are important stories we tell ourselves that have shaped us and brought us to where we are today. But debunking the myths can be important to our professional growth and development. Chia Suan Chong looks at five myths (or facts?) that are worth mulling over.

Top tips for remembering students’ names

2016-02-04

Teachers are often faced with the mammoth task of remembering a large number of student names and associating them with the students' faces. This can be made harder when the names are foreign. Chia Suan Chong offers some top tips to help us remember names.

Language switch; personality shift?

2015-12-15

Who are we when we speak a foreign language? Is proficiency measured by how successfully we can transfer our personalities from our first language? How might the different cultural conventions change the way we present ourselves when speaking in the foreign language? Chia Suan Chong, our ETp resident blogger, considers these questions in her latest blogpost.

What does ‘sleet’ colligate with? a.k.a When you come from a country with no winter

2015-11-24

In this week's blogpost Chia Suan Chong looks at the idea of Christmas lesson plans - but is she full of Christmas cheer or more like the perennial Scrooge..?

The risks of overfamiliarity

2015-11-11

Sometimes, if a favourite lesson or activity doesn't work, shouldn't we be looking at the reasons why, rather than dismissing it as a one-off? In her blog this week, Chia Suan Chong investigates issues of overfamiliarity...

An Oscars 2017 lesson plan

2015-11-03

As the 89th Academy Awards approaches, Chia Suan Chong looks at how teachers can exploit the Best Picture nominations and suggests a lesson plan that could engage students and get them practising their language and critical thinking skills.

Don’t go a-changing : The legitimacy of my English

2015-10-23

In her blog this week Chia Suan Chong considers issues of language and identity and how this might be changing...

Things students say that break my heart – part 2

2015-09-02

In this blog, Chia looks at the meaning behind more of the phrases students say...

Things students say that break my heart – part 1

2015-08-04

In this week's blog Chia Suan Chong looks at the comments students make which really have a lasting impact - and explores the reasons why they make them...

In defence of Callan and other behaviourist methodologies

2015-07-21

On the ELTons-nominated #ELTchat on Twitter this week, there was some debate about drilling brought up in the ELTchat session at noon, and again in the evening session, there was a lot of talk about the use of drills in helping ‘shy’ students or students from cultures that might not be comfortable with expressing and giving opinions.

Death by idioms

2015-07-07

As English confirms its position as the global lingua franca and the language of international trade, business and tourism, there has been more and more talk in the English teaching world regarding the necessity of teaching idioms

Striving for personal development

2015-06-23

When I first did my CELTA at International House London many years ago, I remember my tutors holding up the journals English Teaching Professional (ETp) and Modern English Teacher (MET), and introducing us to the idea of continual professional development (CPD).

Using tasks in a Communicative Language Teaching classroom

2015-06-05

In a continuation from her last post, Chia explores how CLT and the use of tasks can increase interaction in the classroom and considers an evaluation criteria for choosing tasks.