Irina Lutsenko

In the world where Outcomes is all the rage, there’s at least one person who can't see what all this ballyhoo is about. This person is my student Vera , the author of the post below. ✽✽✽ 2 March, 2020 - I remember that day quite vividly. I couldn’t believe my eyes while I was holding it in my hands. It was 660 grams of sheer joy and happiness. It was Outcomes Advanced . Two years have passed since then and now I’m not jumping for joy having this book. After all, there’s only one step between love and hate, isn’t there? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it - I just don't like it either. Even though I can’t pinpoint exactly what it is that puts me off it, I’d like to share a couple of thoughts as to why this book is not my cup of tea. 1. Walk on by if your memory is like a sieve Vocabulary is something lots of people lavish praise on this coursebook for. All those beautiful chunks and collocations, which are real, which are natural, which are extremely useful - and which are imp...

  In this post I want to share an idea and a story you can use with Outcomes Advanced p.105-107 (and with many other text books if you adapt it). Both are aimed at practicing similes. Your students will first work with my story and then write their own. I will tell you what we did, but you feel free to adapt the activity as you see fit. 1.  I was quite inspired by the photo and the task on p.104-105, but the discussion in ex.2 didn’t seem to be enough. So I asked my students to write that story. To make it easier and trigger their imagination even further, I gave them the following questions to think about: - Start from the content. Imagine the character and his motives. Why did he do it? Was he decisive or indecisive about it? What happened after - did it ruin his career or did it help him become a politician? What lessons does he want to teach us? - Choose your form. Do you want to tell it in the first person or third person? If it's a third-person story, who is telling it?...

  Sometimes introduction to exam preparation can (and arguably should) be integrated seamlessly into General English classes. In this post, I want to share an essay written by my wonderful student  Olga who is in my wonderful General English C1+ group. The essay is based on two TED talks, so it turned out to be a great introduction to C2 Proficiency Writing Task 1.  Preparation It's not uncommon for me to use TED talks in class. But rather than work with one, I chose two talks this time:   1. Larry Smith " Why you will fail to have a great career " 2. Benjamin Todd " To find work you love, don't follow your passion ." The talks discuss the same topic - a great career - but from different perspectives.   I gave one talk to one to half of the group and the second one to the second half.  I asked the students to prepare a summary of their talk for their partner and a vocabulary list that would help them present the summary.  In class, what st...

Most writing prompts in the C2 Proficiency writing test consist of three points. One problem I often see in students' answers is that the answer is three isolated pieces, rather than one complete whole. In this book review I wrote for my C2 Proficiency Writing students, I was aiming to show how the answer can be connected on the level of the whole text and be one complete whole. The prompt was written by me too.  An ELT magazine has invited readers to submit reviews of books for teachers. You decide to submit a review of a book that you read recently. Your review should briefly describe the book, explain what impact it had on your professional life, and assess the importance of reading professional literature. ✽✽✽ I am not big on reading books about teaching, guilty as charged, but when this book came out, I bought it on the first day and binge-read it in two hours. “Grammar Nonsense and What To Do about It” by Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley is not a book. It’s a rant, a rant about...

This post is an interview with my friend Olga Kolesnikova . Olga and I went to university together, where we were both trained to be teachers of English. I am now a teacher, as trained. However, Olga decided to pursue a career as a translator and an interpreter. I’ve always been curious to pick Olga's brain about her career path as it is very different from mine despite the same background. In this post, I am asking her my burning questions about her choice and her experience. 1 Tell my readers a bit about yourself. Just like you, I graduated from Pskov Pedagogical University. I worked as a teacher of English there for three years, and I always had a nagging idea that I didn’t have enough life experience to broadcast my ideas and my personality to students. So, I took a step to change it all and leave Pskov for St. Petersburg to become something different. 2 We went to the university together, where we were both trained to become teachers. But you decided to pursue a c...

My fellow teacher Maria Merziapova , when she moved to Moscow was so appalled by the mess that is going on in language schools that she is thinking of going freelance. I’ve been self-employed for several years now, so Maria kept interrogating me about this career path. I decided to take it two steps further: to address her questions and fears in a public post and to invite my amazing colleague Sandra Slivinskaya to join me. Sandra and I wrote our answers completely independently to provide two perspectives. Part 1. My questions. 1. How did you make the decision to leave a steady job and work on your own? Irina I didn't really make this decision. It was a series of small decisions. It always made more sense financially to have my own students rather than work for someone else. At one point I had a full schedule as a self-employed teacher and didn’t need a school. Sandra Well, first of all, after my graduation as a linguist-interpreter, I have never stopped teaching Engl...

This is a guest post by Alisa Chernikova , my student and an English teacher. The post is about working with text and is the third in a series Reflections on "Lexical Grammar" ( a book by Leo Selivan ). Follow the links to read the previous two: 1. Chunks and collocations ; 2. Grammar acquisition . The post contains lots of practical activities we did in class. Alisa dug out some activities I had created long ago and had totally forgotten about. But it turns out I've been following the lexical grammar approach for years without even realizing it. You can give these activities a shot too, btw. The key is at the end of the post.    So we’ve been talking about the lexical approach and lexical grammar in particular. By now we know that chunks and collocations are important both in terms of boosting grammar and vocabulary acquisition. Today let’s have a look at how we can work with text. According to the author, texts are most usually used for the purposes of reading...

This is a guest post by my friend and colleague Vera Novikova . The post is inspired by Philip Warwick’s talk at the NATE conference in St Pete. In this post I would like to share some concerns regarding future employability of millennia generation and a shifting role of an English teacher in particular. Being a devoted sci-fi fan I have to admit that up until recently ideas of a fully automated world seemed rather futuristic and somewhat improbable. Up until recently… when I realized that certain sci-fi future elements have already been here for some time. Most people have already turned into some sort of cyborgs, using their smartphones as an extra part of their body. We have been glued to the screen, scrolling down in social networks, streaming videos, exchanging photos and news, jotting down memos, video phoning, e-buying, reading e-books, blogging, plunging into virtual reality and what not. We have turned into digital residents leaving visible digital footprints wheneve...

Last December I took my fifth international exam in English. “ Why do you take exams? ” is a question I get asked a lot. In this post, I want to answer this question. First, my exam history: 2011 IELTS 8.5 2013 IELTS 8.5 2013 TOEFL 115 2016 IELTS 9 2018 C2 Proficiency A (CPE) So what is this madness for? 1. I want to get an independent assessment of my English. I think my own assessment of my skills is less credible or reliable than an internationally recognized certificate with the C2 English level on it. Additionally, having my level assessed by strangers helps me identify my weaknesses and get a clear picture of what I am good or bad at. 2. I want to see if I can perform under pressure. To be brutally honest, I know my language skills are good even without taking any tests. But I see value in testing myself in high-pressure situations. Many people underperform in exams because of exam nerves. It’s normal. But the way I see it is if I have great language s...

In June, I went to a great seminar on error correction in ELT conducted by Eva Kartchava , who is doing research in this area. As a warm-up, she gave us 5 questions she was going to cover and asked us to discuss them in pairs. My discussion partner turned out to be a “personal broadcaster”- she turned to me and started talking with total disregard to what the questions were, what I had to say, and whether I was even listening. Since I didn’t get a chance to speak then, I want to speak now. In this post, I want to finally answer Eva’s questions and talk about the way I deal with error correction. 1 Should errors be corrected? Yes. Uncorrected mistakes grow into fossilized errors which are virtually impossible to weed out. That said, not all errors and not always. Which brings me to questions 2 and 3. 2 When should learners’ errors be corrected? Errors can be corrected either immediately or after the speaking activity. The downside of the former is that the teacher has to bre...

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely love teaching software developers. They are smart, kind, and have a great sense of humor. But there are certain challenges to teaching them. In this post, I want to talk about these challenges and provide some ways of dealing with them. 1. Their English level is a mess. Level placement is a challenge. There is usually a huge discrepancy between their productive (e.g. speaking) and receptive (e.g. reading) skills. If you choose an Intermediate coursebook, you may soon start doubting your choice because even though the grammar is a perfect match, the reading/listening materials are too simple and uninspiring. This issue can be fixed by substituting or supplementing the materials in the book with the articles/videos in the original. 2. They are extremely smart. I mean, extraordinarily smart, which can play both ways. On the one hand, you don’t need to explain things too much. All they need is a concise and precise explanation. On the other ...

In June, I attended and was a speaker at a summer school in St Pete organized by Живой Английский . I talked about professional growth ideas for English teachers. In this post, I want to summarize my speech and give some useful links. If you are a learner, don’t stop reading - some ideas suit you too! 1. Language exams: IELTS, TOEFL, C1 Advanced / C2 Proficiency I am one of those teachers who take international exams on a regular basis. Taking international exams is a great way to grow for several reasons. First, you get an objective assessment of your language level. Sadly, our level is not always as high as we think it is, and some skills might be lacking. Language exams paint a clear picture. If you are aware of your weaknesses, exams are a good improvement tool because they force you to work towards a measurable, time-bound goal. Even if your English is impeccable, exam preparation is still useful because it never hurts to brush up on your skills. Last but not least, y...