jamiekeddie.com

About this site

I set up this website as an ongoing project so that I could share some of my lesson plans and ideas with other teachers. Content is divided into three main parts:

• A bank of lesson plans
• A series of articles on Learner-Friendly Corpora
• A blog

The lesson plans and articles can be accessed by clicking on the tabs at the top of the page. All of the panels that run down the right hand side of the screen (i.e. Search, Recent Posts, Archives and Categories) are for navigating the blog entries.

About me

I’ve taught doctors, lawyers, hotel managers, teenagers and children. I’ve also been a teacher trainer, written articles and spoken at a few conferences.

My wise fortune cookie language teaching philosophy would be: Always consult your learner within. In other words, never stop asking yourself the question: If I was the student, would I enjoy and benefit from the sessions I give, classes I conduct, lessons I plan, materials I use and techniques I employ?

Hardly revolutionary, I know, and of course such personal reflection is limited in that it cannot take into account the fact that everyone learns in different ways. But, it may be the best thinking frame for any new teacher to get into while waiting for the help of Mr Experience and Mrs Intuition to come along. In any case, constant consultation with the inner learner will certainly allow us to see through the many obscure and unfounded perceptions of what we should and shouldn’t do in the language classroom.

Published articles

Onestopenglish
Corpora in the classroom (a series of 7 articles)
Google fighting in the classroom
Teaching with video

The Guardian Weekly
Get in the picture (February 16, 2007)
Don’t judge these books by their simplification (October 26, 2007)
Turn your students into web writers (May 23, 2008)
The explosive power of video sharing (August 8, 2008)

English Teaching Professional
Work it out for yourself (issue 46)
Image (a series of 10 articles running from issues 49 to 58)

Modern English Teacher
The passive voice and the domino idea (Volume 16, number 1)
The Spontaneously-arising ‘Do’ phenomenon (Volume 17, number 1)

Humanising Language Teaching
Learning the jungle
How to avoid giving bum information
Friendly grammar
Put on the red light
Doubling self portraits

IATEFL Voices
The ‘The-The’ structure (January 2007)
The ‘Mexican frying an egg’ structure (May 2007)

Selected presentations and workshop

Spanish voices in the English classroom
International House Annual ELT conference, Barcelona (February 2006) Link
TESOL-Spain 29^th National Convention, Madrid (March 2006) Link

Images in the classroom
International House, Annual ELT conference, Barcelona (February 2007) Link

Vocabulary lists and grammar rules
International House, Annual ELT conference, Barcelona (February 2007) Link

CLIL-ing me softly
TESOL-Spain 30^th National Convention, San Sebastian (March 2007) Link

Grammar drawings
ACEIA conference, Seville (November 2007) Link
International House Annual ELT conference, Barcelona (February 2008) Link
TESOL-Spain 31^st National Convention, Madrid (March 2008) Link

Corpora in the classroom
TESOL-France, Paris (November 2007) (Sponsored by Onestopenglish) Link

Other projects

www.teflclips.com (a site dedicated to the use of YouTube in teaching. A free lesson plan is posted every week).

Contact

jamie@jamiekeddie.com