Re: The books every TESOL teacher should have? You're welcome, puu_sawn
Ok, here we go, a little review section giving my opinion of those Penny Ur books I have used or owned. ( I once had every resource book she had ever written, which was actually far too many!)
GPA - already mentioned, a must-have
Five minute actuivities - I liked this one, but didn't use it a lot. Some of the 5 minute ideas can be expanded to 30 minute sessions...
Discussions that work - this one was very dense with ideas, but I found it took a fair amount of mental preparation for me before I personally could use it. (I prefer quick fixes maybe, so I can lazily throw an hour-long session together in minutes...)
Keep Talking - good stuff, again, like all of Ur's resource books, but I didn't use it a lot
Teaching Listening Comprehension - brilliant stuff! I wish I had a copy now, teaching IELTS here in China. There is a table early in the book that shows how fluent English speakers actually speak bad English, this table alone is worth the cost of the book, and the activities were excellent too. ('Owdjudu? 'Owarya?))
When I started this list I was convinced there were more books than this in my collection. Maybe I was thinking of another book I had with a similar cover:
Games for Language Learning by Andrew Wright, David Betteridge & Michael Buckley. This gave me some good activities to exploit in class, too.
The good thing about the above list is that there is so much discussion of the hows and whys of EFL teaching that you are almost getting a teacher training course thrown in as a bonus.
Good Luck, keep on drilling! |