In the first post of this series, I described the potential power of Wordandphrase.info and offered some materials I had made to introduce my students to the site. I also identified the possible issues around getting learners to use this site independently and wondered about helping them do so by bringing the site into the […]
What is wordandphrase.info? Wordandphrase.info is a brilliant website. Essentially, it is a user-friendly interface for analysing a corpus. (For those of you who haven’t come across this term as yet, a corpus is a collection of texts stored electronically.) In this case, it is the COCA (Corpus Of Contemporary American English) corpus, a 450 million […]
Following Sandy’s post about a busy week in her life as a DoS of IH Bydgoszcz in Poland, which I found very interesting, and attending a Learning and Teaching Professional Scheme introductory meeting and learning that to become a SFHEA one of the things I need to do is write a personal statement about who I […]
Amongst many other things (e.g. pre-sessional programmes, general English classes, IELTS and CAE preparation, foundation programmes, in-department support, in-sessional programmes and credit-bearing modules) the ELTC also provides a Writing Advisory Service (WAS) to all students studying at the University of Sheffield. It is not only international students who use this service, home students use it […]
It seems hard to believe that a little over five years have already passed since I handed in my dissertation project and left the world of M.A. behind. Five years is a good length of time. Five years is enough to really appreciate the difference doing my M.A. has made… When I decided to do […]
Teacher development is a key part of working life at the ELTC and the team who are in charge of it this term recently rolled out a new initiative, “Bite-size TD”. The idea is to build up a collection of recordings done by teachers of short talks on a range of topics, that other teachers […]
Yesterday (Wednesday the 3rd December, 2015) saw me deliver my first workshop at Sheffield University’s ELTC. This seems a rather fitting way to round off (well, there *are* only a couple weeks left!) my first full term as a teacher here! Inevitably, perhaps, my topic of choice was Learner Autonomy. In preparing this session, the main […]
Yesterday evening, my upper intermediate General English course at Sheffield University’s ELTC started. I will be meeting this multilingual, multicultural group of students twice a week for the next 12 weeks (including this week). The course does not have an exam at the end, which is not something I have encountered often in my teaching […]
Corpus time! This talk is by my M.A. colleague of yore, Jane Templeton, also known as corpus guru! 🙂 We start with a small thought experiment: A class of students don;t know how to use a dictionary. They are reading. One of them asks you the meaning of a word. There is a dictionay next […]
This afternoon, I have had the pleasure of attending a fantastic webinar presented by Andrew Walkley, one half of the popular Dellar-Walkley duo whose project Lexical Lab you might be aware of. The focus of the webinar was Language-focused teacher development, looking at the way we deal with vocabulary in class and what we need […]
Lizzie Pinard 