Steve's ELT Blog

One of the most interesting things to know about this topic are the definitions of some very essential terminology. An error constitutes a mistake which the student cannot self-correct, but may be possible for other students in the same class to correct. Sometimes this is true; sometimes not. I suppose that this comes with experience and knowledge of the CEFR levels . Often our students make slips; especially the higher levels like intermediate and upper-intermediate. Even advanced students can make them. A slip is a mistake that the student can correct on their own ( without any additional instruction). The last are attempts. Attempts are mistakes that every learner of English (or any language for that matter) will make at some point. They may not be familiar with the correct grammar, lexis, etc. However, so long as the mistakes don't detract from understanding the meaning of what the student is saying, these are called local mistakes and may be corrected at the...

Teaching communicatively really became a "thing" in the 1970s, and since then, it has become the hallmark of all EFL teachers in the world. With something so widely known, there is quite a bit of misinformation about it too. While it started as the start and end all of teaching methods, it has evolved since then to be more eclectic - a methodology that is useful for getting students to communicate in the classroom, but by no means the only beneficial methodology in existence. Here are a few things that Communicative Language Teaching (or CLT) is and isn't. "Everything is 'communicative' these days." Jeremy Harmer Fewer things could be said to be truer than this quote. However, just because students are speaking doesn't necessarily make it communicative. Probably the most overlooked quality of CLT is the communicative purpose. Students can talk and talk sometimes for what seems like ages, but when it comes to any real learning benefit, ther...