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Book review: Teach like Finland. 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms by Timothy D. Walker

Once, I walked into [the] first grade classroom at my Helsinki school, and I found tiny children with real needles in their hands. It was especially scary, because I couldn’t find [the teacher] initially. Timothy D. Walker Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The...

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On teaching: Visual media in modern textbooks

In modern times, as a consequence of advertising and the invention of the Internet, we are often exposed to visual media, such as images, videos, infographic designs, emoji, colours or fonts. If we compare two textbooks, one published in 1978 and one in 2010, the difference will be visible immediately,...

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Language teaching: What teaching resources are available for British Business English?

When I used to work as an English teacher, I always had a problem finding good teaching resources for my lessons in British English for business. The textbooks I had were written in American English which didn’t make my work any easier 😉 I recently came across the following titles:...

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Language teaching: What is pragmatics and why is it important when teaching languages?

What is pragmatics? Pragmatics is a language in use, or even better, a meaning in use (the actual use of the language). We need pragmatics to understand how language is used in a specific context and to be able to use it appropriately. Why is pragmatics important when teaching? Pragmatics...

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Book Review: Essential Motivation in the Classroom by Ian Gilbert

This book is AMAZING! It’s fascinating, thought-provoking, funny and practical. If you want to read one book on motivation, this is the one! It’s a must-read for teachers and students, but I also recommend it for parents, business people, coaches and trainers. It is a guidebook of almost 200 pages...

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Career Advice: Am I a Potential Language Teacher?

If you love languages or have enjoyed learning a foreign language, you might want to share that enthusiasm and enjoyment with others by training to be a language teacher. You can teach languages at a variety of levels.  You can teach primary or secondary school children, university students or business...

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Language Learning Techniques – How to Develop your Listening Comprehension

We hope you enjoyed our Language Learning experience posts over the past few weeks. In the posts that follow, we are going to look at different techniques to develop your skills in your chosen language in four different areas: listening, speaking, reading and writing. This posts gives you a few...

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Welcome to Bristol Languages!

Welcome to Bristol Languages, a blog run by language enthusiasts. We are linguists: translators, interpreters, language tutors, travellers, language learners and university students who decided to embark upon this fascinating journey of writing a blog, as we want to understand better the genius that each language represents (Humboldt) and explore...

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