Formative Assessment

(Esim Gürsoy) The following video is based on a project on formative assessment by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Esim Gürsoy and her students:

My EFL Story. Continued

(Meral Öztürk) Post-graduate study Abroad I lived in the U.K. for five years. My husband had already started his PhD a year earlier in another university in the U.K. We lived in Reading while he travelled to Canterbury to meet his supervisor. During my time in the U.K. I did a lot of reading and […]

My EFL Story

(Meral Öztürk) This is a personal account of how I learned English. I am writing this in the hope that it will invite similar accounts from other EFL learners, which then can be pooled together to inform our teaching. Before University I started to learn English 40 years ago in Middle School at the age […]

How to Select Words to Teach?

(Meral Öztürk) In this post, I am going to discuss how you select vocabulary to pre-teach in a reading lesson. Before setting your learners to a task of reading a passage in their coursebook, you would want to teach them important vocabulary contained in the text that might hinder understanding. It is likely that the […]

Motivation versus Interest

We generally give meanings to words more than they actually deserve. Krashen indicates that motivation is finished as a factor in language in education. We are already naturally motivated to learn a new language, so what’s the key point of learning a new language? It is that we need to find compelling and interesting content […]

How Can You Turn A Boring Textbook Exercise Into Fun?

(Meral Öztürk) In this post, I am going to describe two different ways of doing the same activity: the boring way and the fun way. The activity is a typical classroom activity where learners read a text from their coursebook and answer follow-up true-false questions. First, the boring way of doing this activity: The teacher […]

Children learn English by playing game.

I have an activity about animals. It’s guessing game and it works. I will share with you animals’ pictures and a warm up activity presentation which you can use before you start the game. You can download the pictures and you can use them in your lesson. Activity: -Show the students the pictures of animals […]

Should we use translation to teach words?

(Meral Öztürk) Research shows that the most frequently used technique to teach vocabulary in EFL classrooms is translation to learner’s native language. For example, to teach the word computer, you say it is bilgisayar. Do teachers use it because it is the best technique? I don’t think so. Most teachers use it because it is […]

Reading Aloud

This post by Meral Ozturk has been published before on meralozturkblog.wordpress.com