ESL

Emily Bryson ELT Blog posts: a collection of English Language Teaching topics

Leave a Comment / Uncategorised / Emily Bryson

Emily Bryson ELT blog posts: a collection of English Language Teaching topics!

One of the things I love most about blogging is the opportunity to explore different ascpects of teaching English in more detail. It’s a great way to learn and share teaching ideas with the world.

Over the years, I’ve been writing blog posts less for my website and more as a professional blogger. I’ve now written for Ellii ( formerly ESL Library), British Council, Cambridge University Press and National Geographic Learning, not to mention all the magazine articles.

As I feel like I’ve been neglecting my own blog here, I thought I’d write a post collating some of the articles I’ve written for other organisations.

Resident blogging for Ellii (formerly ESL Library)

I’ll start with Ellii, because I’m thrilled to be writing fortnightly blog posts for them. I love their approach to language learning, and their engaging and accessible resources. Their blog is full of ELT related topics from teaching tips to wellbeing advice.

Here are a few of the posts I’ve written them:

Translanguaging: Embracing the Power of Multilingualism in Your Classroom

The Power of Differentiation: Effective Strategies to Support Learners with Mixed Abilities.

A Quick Guide to Universal Design for Learning

Speaking at an ELT Conference: Top Tips for Successful Presentations

How to Simplify Complex Tasks with Visual Prompts

The What, Why and How of Sustainable Development Goals

Using Graphic Organisers for Language Skills Development

Graphic Facilitation 101: Teaching English through Visual Communication

What’s the Story? How One Image Can Develop Visual Literacy and Critical Thinking Skills

Six Ways to Support English Learners from Refugee Backgrounds

Sketchnoting 101: Supercharge Professional Development with Visual Notes

It was pretty tricky to decide which ones to share here! I think I might have got a bit carried away! I also wrote a series of posts on accessibility, which shares ways to support learners with dyslexia, ADHD, low vision and limited digital literacy. And you’ll find a lovely hand drawn activity about banishing your inner troll and embracing growth mindset there too!

You can check out my other posts for Ellii by clicking the image below:

Screenshot of a selection of blog posts Emily Bryson has written for Ellii (formerly ESL Library). Posts include topics such as accessible learning, wellbeing. mental health, end of term activities, teaching learners from refugee backgrounds, digital literacy, using images as grammar prompts. — A screenshot from Ellii.com. Click to view posts.

National Geographic Learning Voices Blog

I am proud to be one of the authors of the Voices series for National Geographic Learning. I love its global and inclusive approach to language learning. It seeks to develop students’ voices in English through intercultural communication, engaging topics and impactful images.

It also follows a pronunciation syllabus which embraces accent diversity. As a language teaching professional with a Scottish accent, this is incredibly refreshing for me. For years, I felt my accent was ‘wrong’ but in reality the way I was taught to teach pronunciation was wrong! Every accent is beautiful and intelligibility is the key!

You can read more about the ethos of Voices in these blog posts:

Marek Kiczkowiak shares how to teach pronunciation for global communication.
Lewis Lansford discusses the importance of teaching authentic listening skills.
Chia Suan Chong gives advice on intercultural skills for the real world.
Alex Warren provides eight tips for best practice leasson planning.
And I share ways to make learning accessible.

Click the image to read the articles:

Images of the front covers of the Voices series of English Language Teaching Coursebooks for National Geographic Learning — Click to read the articles.

Cambridge University Press World of Better Learning Blog

The World of Better Learning site is absolutely full of English Language Teaching related content. It has fantastic posts from Jade Blue, Rachel Tsateri, Peter Fullager and Jo Szoke, to name but a few experts in the field.. So whether you’d like some teaching ideas for Pride Month or ideas for developing Digital Literacy, this is a treasure chest of info.

I was honoured to be asked to write about Graphic Facilitation for them. Here’s a link to my article:

Graphic Facilitation: Getting Creative with Hand-drawn Graphics

British Council Teaching English Blog

The British Council Teaching English site is an absolute staple of any TEFL or TESOL teacher. It has been a tried and trusted throughout my whole career. This site covers every imaginable ELT topic under the sun.

In this post, I share simple ways to use graphic novels, simple drawings, emojis, story graphs and the language experience approach to help students tell their stories.

You can read it here:

How can I celebrate diversity through storytelling?

Love these posts? If you’d like to know more about graphic facilitation or adding a visual or hand-drawn twist to your lessons, check out my courses. Click the laptop image below.

Emily Bryson ELT Blog posts: a collection of English Language Teaching topics Read More »

A graphic for goal setting.

2 Comments / Uncategorized / Emily Bryson

At the beginning of the year, I find it helpful to think about my goals and ambitions for the year ahead. There’s tons of research out there showing that if you write down clear goals, you’re more likely to achieve them. Even more so if you actually draw them.

I created this visual template to help this process. You can use it for you, or with your classes. Write on the .jpg provided or draw your own. I recommend the latter as it will be more fun!

In the section with the target, add one goal for each arrow. Consider different aspects of life, e.g. family & friends, personal development, work, health, money, etc. Be mindful that goals should be flexible and acheivable. I often find my goals change with time.

The thought bubble with stars represents dreams or aspirational goals. These can be things that you or your participants don’t have as much chance to influence. For example, one of my aspirational goals is to visit friends in Spain in the summer, but this is covid dependent.

In class, once students have completed or drawn their own goals, ask them to share their goals and discuss how they might achieve them. You could use language such as ‘I want to..’, ‘I’d like to…’, ‘I hope to…’, ‘It’s my dream to…’, ‘I’d love it if,…’, ‘I’m going to…’, ‘I plan to…’, ‘I will…’ etc, depending on their level. Draw attention to any emergent language.

If you like this, I’m now running online courses in graphic facilitation for English language teaching professionals. Click the image below for more information.

A graphic for goal setting. Read More »

Feedback comes in many forms. But the best is a fairy!

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / Emily Bryson

Feedback is crucial for developing high quality learning experiences. As a materials writer, I value the editorial process because it helps me develop my content from first to final draft. As a teacher, I encourage my students to tell me how they feel about the content of my lessons, and what I can do to support their learning. As a teacher trainer, I am always keen to hear what participants thought of my session so I can make changes the next time I deliver it.

Feedback comes in many forms. Pun intended. It’s true, often feedback comes in the form of a form. Survey Monkey and Google Forms are the ‘go to’.

As a graphic facilitator, I can tell you that there are much more creative (and fun) ways of receiving feedback. In this post, I’d like to share with you to one of those methods.

Let me introduce the Feedback Fairy.

Visual capture sheet inspired by Martha Harding at Scottish Refugee Council.

I was first introduced to the Feedback Fairy by Martha Harding while I was on secondment at the Scottish Refugee Council. Martha had lots of cool ideas for facilitating sessions, and I added this one to my toolkit. I drew this version for the Sharing Lives Sharing Languages project that I was managing at the time.

The feedback fairy is best used as a flipchart, and participants add post-it comments in the various sections. You can do this online using the annotation tools in Zoom or using post-its in Jamboard. If you want individual feedback, you could photocopy one per participant.

Participants are guided to consider:

Heart – things they loved

Toolkit – tools, resources or activities they’d take away

Speech bubble – things they’d tell others

Brain – things they thought or learned

Wand – things they wished had been included

Bin – things they didn’t like

For my first cohort of Engaging Learners with Simple Drawings participants, it was a no-brainer to use the feedback fairy. But since the course focus was on drawings, I did something a little different.

I asked them to draw their own feedback fairies.

I’d like to share some of them here with you. I was blown away by the creativity, skill and imagination. And how much they all loved the course!

Loved this? Want to learn more Graphic Facilitation techniques specifically for ELT professionals? Join one of my Online Courses! Follow this link to find out more: www.emilybrysonelt.com/all-courses/

Feedback comes in many forms. But the best is a fairy! Read More »

Feel the fear, and draw anyway! Launching #drawingELT!

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / Emily Bryson

It is with great excitement that Clare Catchpole (of Express Yourself in English fame) and I launch the hashtag #drawingELT.

We are both firm believers in the power of drawing. It’s creative. It’s relaxing. It’s engaging. It’s supportive. It’s fun. It’s also great for checking understanding, aiding memory, supporting students to take notes and activating life skills such as critical thinking.

We know that there are many teachers out there who agree and who would like to develop their drawing skills. So we’d like to create a community of like-minded ELT professionals. All you need to do is use #drawingELT on Twitter or LinkedIn to share your lesson ideas, blogs, doodles, sketches and flashcards.

To inspire your drawings, we’ll post challenges. These will vary from ELT related topics, to vocabulary items to more complex concepts like grammar, metaphor or puzzlers such as how to draw inclusive pronouns or the difference between need and want.

And before you say it, everyone CAN DRAW. Some of us are maybe just a bit rusty or haven’t had much practice. Drawing is a visual language, and as language teaching professionals we all know the best way to improve is regular practice. I have two mottos:

Feel the fear, and draw anyway!

It’s not art, it’s communication.

As such, with #drawingELT, anything goes. You can share the most rudimentary stick person scribbled on the back of a napkin or a detailed illustration capable of making Da Vinci jealous. Mine will be closer to the former!

Here’s a fantastic little .gif that Clare made to get you in the mood!

I look forward to seeing your creations!

If you’d like to brush up on your drawing skills, why not join one of my online courses? Find out more by clicking the laptop.

Feel the fear, and draw anyway! Launching #drawingELT! Read More »

5 essentials for teaching life skills

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / Emily Bryson

English language learners often want to learn English to improve their life chances. We can help them do so by incorporating life skills into our practice. In fact, it is my firm belief that teaching English and teaching life skills are the perfect match; each supports the other.

Here are five essentials for supporting learners with life skills.

Create a positive classroom atmosphere

It is not only our approach to teaching that makes ELT the perfect environment for incorporating life skills, it is the environment itself. As trainee teachers, one of the first things we learn is the importance of a welcoming, supportive, and encouraging class atmosphere. Students need to feel comfortable in the classroom and positive about their learning experiences.

Our classrooms must therefore be a safe space to learn from mistakes. We can create this by framing failures as learning opportunities and praising learners for their achievements. Giving students time to think before they respond, opportunities to reflect on their learning, and the chance to practise their skills in a supportive environment are invaluable for encouraging life skills acquisition.

Be patient

In creating a safe space to learn, we must also provide sufficient time for the adoption of life skills. Think about how you first learned to organise your time. When you were in your early teenage years, it’s unlikely that you were as good at time management as you are now. You probably learned through a combination of advice from peers, teachers, parents, and other role models as well as simple trial and error. It’s possible that you may still feel that you still haven’t yet perfected this life skill. That’s because life skills take time and practice, and everyone is different. Find out what your students’ aspirations are, give them the confidence to grow, and reassure them that their goals are achievable with a little hard work.

Be a role model

Students naturally look to their teachers for how to behave and succeed. We are role models. By presenting a professional, organised and well-prepared persona, we can inspire our learners to do the same.

Invite questions

Student questions can be tricky, but when they ask difficult questions, that’s when you know their critical thinking skills are developing. Actively encourage your learners to ask questions. Then support them to find the answers for themselves and to help their peers.

Identify goals

In many ways, developing life skills is aspirational. They are not something that anyone can truly say they have mastered and couldn’t improve on in some way. Although I’m regarded as an efficient spinner of many plates and master of deadlines, I may still get caught out with a last-minute photocopier malfunction making me late for class; there’s always room for improvement. As such, we need to help our students to identify realistic goals based on each individual’s current abilities and give sufficient time to process the information, respond, and incorporate it into their lives.

Identifying individual students’ abilities and goals is a great starting point for incorporating life skills into your classes. Every teaching context is different as are the needs of every learner. Some students will already have a strong grasp of life skills, while others have a longer road to travel. Working with your learners and identifying which life skills are most appropriate to them is a crucial first step.

There are some ideas of how to do this in my previous post: Simple drawings to support life skills.

Available now: https://wayzgoosepress.com/emily-bryson/

Want to know more?

My book, 50 Ways to Teach Life Skills is a collection of practical tips and activities to enhance students’ social, academic, critical thinking, digital, and work skills to help students become their best selves.

This guide is simple, supports all levels of learners, and many of the activities require little or no preparation or special materials. Each activity assists students to improve their speaking, reading, writing, listening, grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation skills while also practising their broader skills for life.

It is available now in print and digital from Wayzgoose Press from just £1.99.

For more info about me, my online courses and books you can sign up to my mailing list.

Check out my online courses here:

Emily Bryson ELT. Engaging Learners with Simple Drawings. Graphic Facilitation for English Language Teaching Professionals. Online Course. Group Programme. Simple drawing of a laptop with the text 'online course'.

5 essentials for teaching life skills Read More »

Welcoming whiteboards!

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / Emily Bryson

I can’t tell you how excited I was to be back in the classroom this week. I got to teach real live students! It was wonderful.

I also got to use a whiteboard. And a whiteboard marker! What a treat!

The beginning of term is a time for welcoming learners, getting to know them and double checking they know exactly where they are going and when.

This year, I’m teaching a beginner and a starter class. I tend to find that writing times, dates and room numbers on the board can lead to confusion. Drawing some simple icons can help make this information clearer.

I’d like to share the simple icons I use with you. You’ll notice that these are not works of art, that my whiteboard is a little smudged and that I probably wrote these in a hurry. That’s because I did. I’m a teacher. That’s how we roll!

Welcoming learners with simple drawings helps communicate information more clearly.

How do you welcome your learners? How do you make sure they understand their induction information? I’d love to hear your ideas, or to see your whiteboards!

If you like these ideas, and want to learn more zero prep activities for the English language classroom, check out my online courses!

You can find more information about my online courses here. Or click the laptop icon.

Welcoming whiteboards! Read More »

ESOL for Employability: support organisations every practitioner should know about

What is Graphic Facilitation (and why is it perfect for ELT)?

2 myths and 1 lesson plan: proof that drawing online is quick and simple.

2 Comments / Uncategorized /

I recently sent out a survey on how English Language Teachers use drawings in the classroom. I was a little surprised to discover a belief that drawings work best in live classes. I would like to lay this myth to rest.

There are a few ways you can draw online.

Draw before class. Scan the image with your phone (I use Camscanner). Send to your students.
Stick some A3 paper on your wall (I make paper tape less sticky by sticking it to my clothes first). Point your webcam at it.
Pin a flipchart to your wall (I used two panel pins). Point your webcam at the flipchart.
Buy a visualiser and display a video stream of you drawing on a notebook at your desk. Mine is an Ipevo.

A visualiser is basically what we’d once have called an overhead projector. It displays a live image on to a whiteboard, interactive whiteboard or on a shared screen in a video conferencing platform.

Another myth is that using drawings in an online class takes time. I’d argue it actually saves time by reducing preparation time.

To prove it, here’s a quick lesson I did recently. It took zero prep (well, a tiny bit of thinking time before class). It was the first week back after holidays and we were revising past tense word order in questions. The aim was to get students talking about their holidays to prepare them for writing about it at home.

Step 1: Draw some simple icons to represent each question you want them to discuss. Display the simple visual prompts. Students can later use these icons as prompts for writing.

Step 2: Discuss with students what each prompt might mean. Ask students to match where, when, what and who to each icon. Once they’ve matched the more obvious icons, support them to add ‘Did’ and ‘How’.

Step 3: Ask students to write a question for each icon, starting with the question words. You could ask them to write their answers in the chatroom, collaborate in a Google Doc or to work together in breakout rooms. Feedback and write up the questions as a whole class. Discuss grammatical features of past tense word order in questions.

Step 4: Ask students to discuss the questions in breakout rooms. Feedback as a whole class. Discuss new vocabulary.

Step 5: Show students a model text about what someone did in their holidays (e.g. an email or social media post), or collaboratively create one using the language experience approach. Ask students to write about their holidays for homework.

This is just one of many quick and simple techniques I use to engage my learners online and build their visual vocabulary.

It’s basically four steps: visual prompts, written prompts, elicit questions, discuss questions.

You can use this technique for various topics and grammatical points simply by changing the icons. It’s a great way to stimulate learners, give visual clues and get them talking. It can be used face to face or online. I’d love to know if you use it or have ideas of other ways to use it.

Loved this? Want to learn more Graphic Facilitation techniques for your classroom? Join one of my Online Courses! Follow this link to find out more: www.emilybrysonelt.com/all-courses/

2 myths and 1 lesson plan: proof that drawing online is quick and simple. Read More »

Teaching ESOL Literacy Online

4 Comments / Uncategorized /

Although my materials writing hat is well versed in zoom calls and delivering webinars, my ESOL lecturer hat still took some getting used to teaching online when COVID hit. Teaching online is great, when your learners are self-directed, tech savvy and have all the devices and connections required to attend classes.

Teaching online is somewhat more challenging when your students have little or no educational history, limited IT skills, devices whose best feature is a game called ‘snake’ or who need to save the meagre 3G they can afford to stay in touch with their loved ones overseas. That’s before considering their housing provider may think it’s a good idea to take their weekly allowance from them and house them in a hotel during lockdown. Learning ESOL during a pandemic may not be top priority.

But, us ESOL Literacy Lecturers don’t let impossible situations stop us. We plough on through and do what we can with what we have. And what we had was Whatsapp. Not ideal in terms of giving out personal numbers, but this was crisis and I trusted my students and was well aware that anything involving having to correctly type login details would result in multiple students being locked out of their learning.

Whatsapp is actually quite an undervalued teaching platform. You can share and find links, videos and photos easily, provide audio support to all texts, correct students work using the draw function and use the emojis to illustrate vocabulary. You can also upload documents, have audio recorded conversations and even video call to up to eight people. Plus, when your aim is to get students to read and write in English, Whatsapp encourages them to type messages to each other and respond.

The very first lesson was simply handwriting a few sentences, illustrating them with simple graphics and recording a video of me reading the text whilst pointing to each word. Students then had to record themselves reading the text, answer some comprehension questions, then personalise it. Over the weeks these lessons got more sophisticated and included things like YouTube videos, Padlets, Quizlets, EdPuzzles and quizzes on Google Forms, yet what I always got the best response from was a simple handwritten text with audio support.

Then I figured it was time to move on to the big scary world of email. When we started teaching online, probably around 50% of the class didn’t have an email address. So I created a walk-through video of how to set up an email address and shared it with the group. I started to get a trickle of emails but I wanted 100% of students to be emailing by the end of term, so I asked a friend to send the link to set up a gmail account in Arabic and forwarded that to the students. Genius. Every student now had an email address. But I knew I had to keep them using it. I didn’t want them to email me once and forget how to do it, or forget their passwords. So every single email that I got, I replied with a simple question, then students had to email me back. I had a lovely conversation about yellow flowers with one student and about Glasgow parks with another.

One of the main challenges of teaching ESOL Literacy is that it’s extremely hard to find suitable materials to teach reading, writing and phonics to adults. Most are aimed at children and have delightfully childish pictures of apples, books and cats to accompany the alphabet. This made teaching online more challenging. While my peers had the luxury of coursebook e-packs, I had to create most things myself. Here are some sites which I am eternally grateful for:

Bow Valley College – Graded Readers for ESL Literacy learners

LanguageGuide.org – Very basic supported vocabulary learning

British Council ESOL Nexus

English My Way

Lisa Karlsen ESOL Literacy resource pack – worth every penny

TeachHandwriting.co.uk

Liverpool College ESOL Online

ESOLCourses.com

I AM YOU Humanitarian Aid – Facebook page with lots of ESOL Literacy videos

ESOLUK.co.uk

Excellence Gateway ESOL

ABC English

English Hub for Refugees

Education and Training Foundation – New to ESOL Literacy pack – tips and activities.

Diglin – phonics and skills activities

Citizen Literacy app – City of Glasgow College app to teach phonics to adults. Still in Beta, but you can trial. Watch this space!

LESLLA – Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults website and webinar video.

Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) ESOL Literacy resources

Excellence Gateway Hub – UK resources

NATECLA Scotland – resource list for ESOL Literacies

If you know any more, please share them with me. I’d love to add them to this post.

Overall, my main tip of teaching any students with basic ICT skills is never give up. The more students use tech, the more confident they’ll be, even if your learners can barely type their passwords into the computer.

In many ways, I think COVID has had some positive impacts on ESOL. I’m sure it catapulted some learners with low levels of study skills into being more self-directed learners. Students who previously needed (or had) their hand held have been effectively forced into taking ownership of their learning and getting to grips with tricky ICT. Plus, we now have a whole load of lovely interactive materials which future learners will be able to use in their own time.

If you’d like more information on how to teach ESOL Literacy, check out my courses on Language Fuel ELT Training Library . Each course takes less than twenty minutes and is full of practical hints and tips:

Teaching Adult ESOL Literacy: What is it and what’s involved?

Practical activities for teaching basic literacy to adult ESOL Learners.

Getting Started with Adult ESOL

Emily Bryson ELT Language Fuel ELT Training Library courses - Teaching ESOL and Teaching ESOL LIiteracy

Graphic Facilitation is a great way to support learners with literacy needs. Simple drawings can help learners who don’t have L1 script to take vocabulary notes. It also makes whiteboards, rubrics and worksheets more accessible.

Check out my online courses to find out more!

Teaching ESOL Literacy Online Read More »

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Emily Bryson ELT blog posts: a collection of English Language Teaching topics!

Resident blogging for Ellii (formerly ESL Library)

National Geographic Learning Voices Blog

Cambridge University Press World of Better Learning Blog

British Council Teaching English Blog

Love these posts? If you’d like to know more about graphic facilitation or adding a visual or hand-drawn twist to your lessons, check out my courses. Click the laptop image below.

Join my many happy course participants today!