David Dodgson

David Dodgson blogged for Modern English Teacher over 4.5 years up to the end of 2021. During his time as the MET blogger, David wrote 52 posts spanning his teaching and managerial experiences across 3 different countries and 3 different jobs and drawing on his 20+ years in ELT. Throughout his career, David has worked in Kazakhstan, Bahrain, Turkey and Gabon, gaining experience with young learners, adults, EAL students and exam preparation classes, and holds an MA in EdTech and TESOL and the Trinity DipTESOL. When he finally returned to the UK, he relished the challenge of teaching in the UK for the first time as EAL Coordinator in a leading independent school, which was reflected in some of his more recent posts. David still continues to write, so expect to see articles from him in the new-look MET, as well as in publications like MET, ETp and TESL-EJ. You can find his personal blog here. His interests include supporting learning with technology, and teacher self-development. He also uses digital games as authentic materials for language learning, and blogs about it at eltsandbox.wordpress1.com. David believes that writing articles and blog posts allows you to be part of the wider ELT community, provides a platform to share and reflect on your experiences and to learn from others by engaging with the world of ELT beyond your own personal teaching context. So above all, his advice is to "write on"!

Tried and Tested

In this month’s post, Modern English Teacher’s resident blogger David Dodgson shares his reflections inspired by two articles on preparing students for tests from our July 2018 special edition on classroom research. He discusses ways to encourage learners to be more involved in the preparation process while also becoming more familiar with the exam format and task requirements.

Revisiting Reflections: A Blogging Retrospective

We all know the value of reflection for our development as teachers. It helps us learn from experience and focus on key areas. But do these reflections always need to be recent? What can we learn from revisiting our past reflections? That is the focus of our post this month as David Dodgson offers a retrospective on his first blogs from a decade ago.

Action to Research (and back again)

In the third post of this series about research in the classroom, David Dodgson explains how he engages in cycles of action research to investigate and experiment with new ideas, understand learners better, and develop professionally.

From Research to Action – Using Articles to Inform Practice

In the second post of this series about research in the classroom, David Dodgson highlights how two Modern English Teacher articles informed his approach to introducing mobile devices with his teenage learners.

A Focus on Phonics

Linking between our two most recent issues on Speaking and Pronunciation, and Teaching Reading, David Dodgson takes a look at phonics. This method of introducing letters and sounds when teaching young learners to read and write has become increasingly popular in EFL contexts in recent years. However, our resident blogger is not entirely convinced and in this post, explains why.