Teaching unplugged 

As always, Scott Thornbury delivers an inspiring, stimulating and enjoyable talk.

Thanks a lot for sharing it. It's the great pleasure to see how Scott work with materials, and actually everything is absolutely clear. I practice unplugged teaching from time to time and my students really love it though I see now that what I did wasn't enough. There is (as usually) a room for improvement.

Thought provoking and very insightful.

Wow. Thank you Scott Thornbury and thank you CB Armenia for posting this!

Unplugged stands for Teaching With No Materials. And it might seem to be a great idea all teachers should be willing to steal from Scott Thornbury, but as Hugh Dellar once said, 'It's bloody difficult'. This approach has a serious number of flaws no teacher wants to deal with. And number one flaw is probably 'Thinking on the spot' and the second one would probably be a teacher has to be a good font of ideas, meaning what to teach, what tasks to do, how to do them, how to squeeze the grammar presentation and error correction stages (what examples to give if a student still doesnt understand) into this one lesson in order for this not to be a bloody discussion club. And about amount of preparation? Ok, 3 mins, it's ok. But then 'thinking on the spot' will bring all your expectations down, it's for sure.

This is really nice! Hope i can be a good teacher recently.

Genius. Should be compulsory viewing on training courses.

Hello everyone, I still have that question in mind of how we can "measure" the learners' progress (from A2 to B1 for example) without a syllabus. Because, apparently, in Teaching Unplugged, there's no syllabus to follow or any kind of testing. Could anyone discuss this point, please?

I wish my local had the same ratio.

TMTTT

I was always against this kind of teaching as it wasn't the approach that was drilled into me during my CELTA training but then when I learnt Spanish and French, I never wanted to learn those languages the way I teach English and that gave me pause for thought. We overestimate how important teaching ESL and its different methods actually are in my opinion.

I thought meta-language isn't needed for strong communicative and unplugged teaching. Here we are again talking on short sentences and phrasal expressions, plus a noisy classroom !