Teaching Matters

The Swedish Curriculum is based on Communicative Language Learning and Teaching. According to most researchers within this field, grammar should be presented following one principle: WHEN it's needed and not IN CASE it's needed. To help argue my point I found this short article summarising a meta-analysis by Nina Spada ...

Are you so unsure of what Digital Citizenship really means and entails that you don't even consider teaching about it in your class? As soon as you bring digital tools in your class, you should also make your students aware of fair use and the real risks. WebEnglish.se has a ...

For this Halloween season, WebEnglish.se is loaded with materials. All related Theme Pages have been updated for teachers to make the English classes spooky with witches, monsters, murders and ghosts.

Halloween 1-3

Monsters, 3-5

Gruffalo, 3-5

Halloween 4-6

Mystery, 7-8

Halloween 7-9

Salem Witch Hunt 7-B1

Halloween B1

...

This year, there are new Halloween Theme Pages in WebEnglish.se. There used to be just two, Elementary (1-6) and Intermediate (7-9). Now there are four, one for each level and the new level "B1" mainly for Eng5. If you have an advanced year 9, you can use the B1-level theme ...

Swedish students are generally supposed to be at the CEFR language level B1.1. when they finish school after passing the National Test in English at the end of year 9. They will continue to level B1.2. in Upper Secondary School. WebEnglish.se has so far only categorised the themes up until ...

Both themes, Autumn-Fall, 2-6 and Weather, 1-6 have been updated in WebEnglish.se and presented under Current Topics on the Homepage. I found several new Autumn songs, and a couple of new Weather vocabulary exercises. Next week is Banned Books Week in the USA. My students were always astonished ...

I have really sad news. I tried my damnest to find the Ghost Hunter from the BBC Archives. After my visit to their offices in London, I had direct contacts with several BB/CBBC Staff who tried to help me, until they found the one in charge, who couldn't. Some extracts ...

There is a new day of celebration marked in WebEnglish.se Calendar: International Day of Democracy on Sept 15th. I have overlooked it before, but with everything that is happening in the world right now, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss democracy in the intermediate-level classes. The actual day ...

Money Talks

I have been in contact with most of the bigger publishers and other material providers in Sweden during my 40 years of teaching. They all admit to one principle: They are in it for the money and seem not to care about the Curriculum. Curriculum doesn’t sell. To ...

I love Calendars! At the beginning of every term, I used to love filling in the calendar. It felt like Christmas to see all those days like presents lining up in front of me. Somehow they predicted my imminent future with secret promises for every date. Ever so often I ...

As you may already have noticed, we have tidied up WebEnglish.se over the summer. All currently relevant themes and links have now been updated. Among others, The Daily News Page has been looking a bit tattered since the last update, but now I have refreshed it and added some new ...

In order to create structure in the lessons and make the students feel secure in a routine, WebEnglish.se has a few suggestions for intermediate classes: Inspirational talks vary from a couple of minutes to a whole hour. They can be used on their own in order to get the class focused or ...