Thomas Ziegelwagner

9 POSTS

Thomas studied English and history at the University of Vienna, Austria, and later, political education at the Donau-Universität Krems, Austria. He has a Master’s degree in English and History and holds an MSc in Political Education. He has been teaching for more than 20 years, mostly in BHAK St Poelten, Austria (an upper secondary business college for students aged between 14 and 19); and since 2022 at the Centre for Business Languages and Intercultural Communication at the Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. He is interested in teacher training, teaching English as a working language and in CLIL. He has recently got involved in e-learning and in facilitating the online learning process.

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Peer-to-peer collaborative correction

2025-02-11

Collaborative correction, also known as peer correction, means that students correct each other rather than the teacher doing the job. In this article, I would like to look at this teaching technique with a special focus on peer correction of written work. The article will try to answer the question: Which benefits can teachers garner when using peer correction? It will also look at possible pitfalls. In addition, it will illustrate how to instruct students to hopefully make the most of the technique. I will also highlight some published material dealing with the topic and, finally, I would like...

The bigger picture – using slightly ambiguous photos as a warm-up task

2024-09-12

The article explains the rationale for the idea, tips on how to vary the activity and how to source interesting photos.

What if . . . there was a different approach?

2024-01-23

The article describes different approaches to teaching conditional sentences all of which encourage the learners to work things out themselves.

What if . . . there were more?

2023-11-22

Textbooks do not always totally reflect the language which is actually used. It is probably time to look more clearly at usage and rely less on published grammar.

Omniscient teachers versus ‘those who can’t do, teach’

2023-03-15

The article argues that the role of the teacher is to help students learn, to have the best techniques, materials and approaches to facilitate learning, not to be quicker than the students at doing difficult exercises.

Me, myself and I

2023-01-16

This article describes the brown bag presentation where students plan a short presentation based on photos on and items in an everyday shopping bag.

The proof of the writing is in the proofreading

2022-03-18

Do your students use the editing facilities offered by Microsoft? If not, why not? Do they continue to make the same mistakes on a regular basis? Would they benefit from a Favourite Mistakes list? Read the article and download the online resource.

From chaos to order

2022-01-26

How much do you help your learners with the planning and outlining of a writing task. This article explores a way of helping students improve their output of ideas and good writing at the same time, helping them to see the link between plan and final version and the need for self-editing.

Un-will-ing students: teaching awareness of the will future

2019-01-03

Thomas Ziegelwagner uses a famous line from the film The Terminator to activate his students’ awareness of the use of will for spontaneous decisions and promises.