IELTS Listening Test: 8 Proven Teaching Tips
IELTS Listening scores stall for a reason — prediction, paraphrase, spelling, and accent gaps. 8 classroom-tested teaching drills that close them fast.
IELTS Listening scores stall for a reason — prediction, paraphrase, spelling, and accent gaps. 8 classroom-tested teaching drills that close them fast.
Walk in, scan the board and any posted rules first, then run activities the students have already done before — never introduce something new on a cold assignment. If no lesson plan was left for you, default to a rotation of five no-prep speaking and review games that work at any level, keep a simple…
The best IELTS reading strategies are skimming for structure before reading questions, scanning for exact keywords instead of full sentences, and budgeting roughly 18 minutes per passage so the hardest section never eats your remaining time. Academic Reading test takers score a mean of 6.32 worldwide, and most point losses come from time mismanagement and…
Socrative for ESL teachers: real 2026 pricing, Space Race and Exit Ticket features, and honest pros and cons for language classrooms.
BookWidgets is a $9-a-month tool that turns PDFs, quizzes, and worksheets into auto-graded digital exercises, and for ESL teachers its strongest feature is the Split Worksheet widget, which puts a reading passage on one side of the screen and the comprehension questions on the other. It grades about 90% of question types automatically, supports audio…
SLIFE students — those with limited or interrupted formal education — need a different starting point than other ESL learners because they’re missing foundational literacy or numeracy skills, not just English vocabulary. The fix isn’t harder worksheets; it’s building oral language first, treating the home language as an asset instead of a problem, and screening…
ESL students build note-taking skills by learning to write keywords and symbols instead of full sentences, using a short template (title, 3 main points, new vocabulary, one question), and listening to the same audio two or three times before filling in the gaps. Model the process out loud first — most ESL students have never…
Teach resume and cover letters as two separate documents with two separate jobs: the resume lists facts in fragments, the cover letter explains those facts in full sentences. Start with a culture check (not every country’s CV looks like a US resume), build an action-verb bank before anyone drafts a line, and run a peer-review…
Co-teaching with local teachers works when you split roles by lesson phase instead of by title, protect a fixed slot of planning time even if it’s only 15 minutes, and let your local co-teacher take the lead on classroom culture, discipline norms, and parent communication. The pairs that struggle almost always skip the planning time…
A structured system for peer feedback in ESL classrooms: sentence frames, a compliment-suggestion-correction protocol, feedback forms, partner rotation, and fixes for face-saving classroom cultures.