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Developing Intercultural Language Materials Freda Mishan and Tamas Kiss Routledge ISBN 978-1032651378 With their wealth of expertise, Freda Mishan and Tamas Kiss offer an insightful guide to understanding culture and bringing intercultural teaching into the classroom. Developing Intercultural Language Materials takes readers on a journey through four distinct yet interconnected sections: Research to Implications; Implications to Application; Application to Implementation; and finally, Implementations to Research. This book review will explore each part in detail. The first part, titled ‘Research to Implications’ serves as a guide to help readers navigate the key findings from academic research. Acting as a foundation for the book, this chapter...

The Minimal Pair Collection: PronPack Accent-friendly Pronunciation Teaching Mark Hancock Hancock McDonald ELT ISBN 978-1838404062 It is now 37 years since I did my RSA Cert TEFLA in Cambridge and balked at teaching sure and shore as homophones. In my Scottish accent, they weren’t. The speakers in the 80s coursebook listenings all had plummy, ‘accentless’ voices. I remember learning about RP (received pronunciation), and understanding that ‘received’ meant ‘approved’ or ‘sanctioned’ ( not that you had been to a reception at Buckingham Palace.) And on the phonemic chart, hung on every classroom wall, where the heck was the ‘ch’ sound, as in ‘loch’? Decades...

Many of my ESL students in East Asia have asked me to help them learn about the rhythms and cadences of the English language. They will tell me with desperation in their eyes that they do not want to speak what they often describe as ‘monotone’ or ‘robot’ English. I developed the game ‘Drama queen English’ specifically for them. Of course, we all know what a drama queen is. This is a person who over-reacts emotionally and often makes a big deal out of nothing. I think the term applies to men as well as women – I know...

While I love teaching English to teens, I find grading their writing assignments and providing meaningful feedback less enjoyable. The main reason for this: it is a very time-consuming and repetitive task, especially when you have almost 100 students. Moreover, I always feel a little insecure about the objectivity of my assessment and grades, even though I use rubrics with specific criteria. I have come across blog discussions about using AI to assist with grading, sparking my curiosity. So, after some hesitation (‘Is this not my job?’), I decided to put it to the test and had ChatGPT do...

In language teaching, one of the things I believe teachers struggle with the most is not seeing improvement in their students. There are times where I find that, despite the feedback I provide, I don’t seem to notice much progress. This can be a frustrating moment when thinking back to all the lessons you’ve taught throughout the academic year. However, when I came across this issue with writing in my Cambridge B2 First exam class, I tried to think of a new way to impact my learners’ progress dramatically. I asked myself what was so difficult? Why wasn’t there...