On Satur
day 15 October I attended the London Language Show Live. At this event, I bought the pocket book with “100 Teaching Tips” by Penny Ur. The author started teaching in 1970 and has been working in primary, secondary and higher education. She has also worked as a teacher trainer, has authored lots of other books and presented at conferences around the world.
This book is really very useful to many teachers, both starting and more experienced. It provides exactly 100 practical tips, each covering one page. This is just the nice thing about it; I like taking the pocket with me to the “smallest room”, browsing through it and reading one or two tips.
People who prefer a more structural reading, might like the classification of the various tips into different areas of classroom teaching, including starting and ending the lesson, choosing a coursebook, classroom management, error correction, games, group work, working with mixed ability classes and assessment. Every different part of teaching English as a foreign language is covered with tips for teaching grammar, vocabulary, reading, listening, writing and speaking.
I particularly appreciate “tip 100”, the very final one: “Do your own thing”. Let me quote the lead to this tip: “To be really good at teaching you need to find your own teaching style and choose the methodology that suits you and your students”.
The 120-page book has been published this year by Cambridge University Press. Penny Ur talks about it in this YouTube video.