Joe McVeigh

The December 2011 TESOL Quarterly contains a wonderful study by Dilin Liu analyzing the frequency of phrasal verbs across several corpora. This is a really useful article for teachers and materials writers, with lots of great information in it and a valuable companion to his 2003 corpus study on the […]

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How much time do you spend preparing your lessons in advance? Are you a planner? Or do you like to let the lesson take its own course?
As a young student teacher I learned how to carefully plan my lessons. I would write out exactly what I planned to do during each part of the fifty-minute […]

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I am not good at remembering names and faces. In the small town where I live,  I am constantly running into people and trying to recall if I know them from my son’s school or from musical theater or from church or just where we might have met.
So you can imagine the difficulty I have […]

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One of my most memorable teachers was a high school English teacher. Thomas Donovan had been teaching for nearly forty years and was in his sixties when I had him as a 14-year-old student. He was what today we would call “old school.” That is, he was very traditional in the way […]

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A recent discussion on TESOL’s e-list for the Teacher Education Interest Section provoked some interest in helping novice (and more experienced) teachers find jobs in our profession. Some of the conversation centered around how long a resume should be or in what order. Doesn’t seem to me that it much matters. The point is to […]

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If you’ll be attending the TESOL Convention in Boston, come and see my presentation with Ann Wintergerst on Ten Techniques for Teaching Culture in the Classroom.  The presentation is on Thursday, March 25th from 10:00-10:45 AM in room 153 B.  We’ll be highlighting some of the activities from our forthcoming Pearson Longman book, Techniques for […]

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  Tim Murphey had his EFL students at Kanda University of International Studies in Japan talk about their experiences learning English in junior high school and high school.  They then made a very interesting video about their experiences. In it, they ask the Japanese Ministry of Education to change the exam system and they ask […]

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Writing in the January/February 2010 edition of The Atlantic, Amanda Ripley follows the efforts of the U.S. nonprofit organization Teach for America to distill the essential qualities of teachers who really make a difference for students in elementary and high schools. She reports that the following six characteristics are what set great teachers apart: 1) […]

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I’m back from a terrific time in Chile, hosted by colleagues at Universidad Andres Bello in Santiago. They were wonderful hosts, and while there, I gave a talk called Teaching Languages with Technology. Several of the teachers at the university joined in and gave brief demos of the way that they use the language lab, […]

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The deadline for the RFP below has now passed.
I’m presently engaged in a consulting project for a large group of for-profit universities called Laureate Education, Inc. This organization is based in Baltimore and comprises a network of about 25 universities in 15 countries including 280,000 non-native speakers of whom about 100,000 […]

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