How Can You Bring English Lessons to Life? TEFL Tips, Timelines and Tasks - TEFL A-Z T – S06E20

How can you help students understand English grammar, speak with more expression and remember what they learn?Welcome to another tea-fuelled episode of How to English: Teach and Learn with Gav & Em — the podcast for teachers and learners of English as a foreign language! This week, we tackle the letter T: TEFL, timelines, tone, task-based learning and teaching tips from students themselves. Expect laughter, biscuits, tongue twisters and a few teacherly tangents. ☕️Drawing on our own classroom experiences, we share advice for new English teachers: be prepared, give yourself time to build confidence and talk to your students when things go wrong. Even opening the classroom blinds can become a group activity!How do you use timelines to teach English tenses? We describe our way through biscuit theft, interrupted actions and perfect tenses, comparing how we picture them. Then we explore tone and intonation: how can the same words sound hopeful, impatient or mischievous? And what happens when May meets may, or six versions of “will” appear in one sentence?We also hear the student perspective. Why does fun make lessons memorable? What if learners understand a grammar rule but forget it when speaking? Should teachers interrupt to correct mistakes? And do students really need another list of phrasal verbs?Looking for task-based learning activities? We discuss escape rooms, planning a holiday, spot the difference and a hands-on guessing game with some unexpected answers. We finish with “a” versus “an”, how our transcript can support listening and pronunciation practice, and a tongue twister that puts us both to the test.If you find the show useful, you can send us a thanks at https://ko-fi.com/howtoenglishpodYou’ll also find https://howtoenglishpod.com full of practical teaching ideas and resources ready to use.Timestamps00:00 – Welcome and tea talk01:06 – TEFL tips: be prepared and don’t stress08:06 – Timelines: visualising English grammar16:55 – Tone: intonation, emotion and meaning20:18 – May and Will: wordplay and sentence stress25:04 – Teaching tips from learners32:47 – Task-based learning: communicative classroom activities39:17 – Gav’s T tip: test your articles42:00 – Em’s T tip: transcription and IPA43:13 – A tongue-twister challenge44:22 – Outro and roller disco