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Week by week on a Trinity CertPT course - what to expect
Whether you teach General English, business English, EAP or any other English-medium subject the Level 6 Trinity Certificate for Practising

Tom Garside
Mar 15, 20225 min read


Focus your pronunciation teaching: How to add context to your pronunciation lessons
Pronunciation is often taught as a sideline to the main grammar or vocabulary focus of a lesson, with pronunciation issues being picked up

Tom Garside
Mar 10, 20224 min read


Targeting Pronunciation - issues for speakers of specific languages
When teaching pronunciation, it can be hard to decide what specific sounds or sound patterns to focus on. The best way to plan a focused

Tom Garside
Feb 28, 20224 min read


The golden rules of TESOL
No matter how long you have been teaching, there are a few basic routines which apply to any language education situation. Initial training

Tom Garside
Feb 18, 20226 min read


The Trinity CertPT: for international school and EMI teachers
If you teach in an international school, or in an institution where many of your students do not speak English as a first language, or if

Tom Garside
Jan 13, 20222 min read


Teach the student, not the curriculum
In the vast majority of primary and high schools around the world, students are grouped into large classes of 30+ students by age - in each

Tom Garside
Dec 5, 20214 min read


Four common teaching nightmares and how to deal with them on the spot
It happens to the best of us - our best laid lesson plans are ready to go, and something unexpected happens. Unforeseen situations happen

Tom Garside
Nov 24, 20215 min read


Five reasons to get CertTESOL qualified this year
We’ve all had a couple of years to think about where we are and what we’re doing, but 2022 promises to be the year when the world opens up a

Tom Garside
Nov 14, 20214 min read


‘Beaming in’ to physical classrooms - more ways to flip and blend online language learning
Over the past couple of years, many teachers have been adapting to new ways of teaching online - through Zoom and Skype, working with groups

Tom Garside
Nov 8, 20213 min read


15 things we wish we’d known when we trained as TEFL teachers...
1. Unless you teach English, you don’t really know what it involves. Nobody seems to get what TESOL is - it’s either seen as a middle-

Tom Garside
Oct 28, 20215 min read


How can the Trinity CertPT help you to specialise in ELT?
If you are looking for professional development in the English language education field where you work, the Level 6 Trinity Certificate for

Tom Garside
Oct 17, 20214 min read


How to teach communicatively with groups of 40+ students
Although the ideal for most private language centres is class sizes of below 20, with a range of ages and cultures studying together, the

Tom Garside
Oct 12, 20216 min read


What is the information gap?
Any form of education depends on a fundamental element: the gap between what students already know and what they are learning

Tom Garside
Oct 4, 20214 min read


Time to think… Building critical/analytical thinking into the language classroom
While teaching a group of students in China, I once used the philosophical ‘trolley problem’ as a stimulus for discussion. The students had

Tom Garside
Sep 30, 20215 min read


If I could be anywhere...how to teach conditional sentences
Of all the sentence structures in English, some of the most complex and often-confused are conditionals. These useful but tricky structures

Tom Garside
Sep 24, 20214 min read


What is language practice?
In the language classroom, we hear a lot about the role of practice - students need to show their progress by using the language they are

Tom Garside
Sep 7, 20213 min read


Looking to the future… why is there no future tense in English?
As in most languages, we can talk about the future in English, but when it comes to teaching the language we use to communicate about the

Tom Garside
Sep 1, 20214 min read


4 steps to giving clearer instructions to language learners
If you were teaching someone to fold an origami crane for the first time, how would you do this? Would you explain every step at once, using

Tom Garside
Aug 23, 20214 min read


Inductive vs deductive approaches to teaching - what’s the difference?
As we have noted on this blog many times, the majority of language teaching in the world is performed by teachers working in a diverse range

Tom Garside
Aug 15, 20213 min read


Top-down and bottom-up approaches to language - what is the difference?
When thinking about how to present language to students at the beginning of a class, we have a choice to make: do we need to introduce the

Tom Garside
Aug 11, 20213 min read
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