Monolingual or Bilingual dictionaries?

I prefer bilingual dictionaries for lower levels.  This gives them a quick answer to their questions, without raising a whole load of new ones. 

For higher levels, monolingual dictionaries are better, and students at this level are more tolerant of them, I think, and less likely to feel demotivated if they don't fully understand something.

I have to say that I don’t use dictionaries a lot in my classes.  We don’t have many of them in the school.  With my CAE class recently, I recommended that they downloaded the word reference App, as I find this very useful myself.  I quickly looked up the word for 'holly' the other day, for example, & we all learnt something!

I very often rely on my own knowledge of Spanish/Catalan to provide students with a translation in class. Nearly all my classes are monolingual, which makes this possible.

What's the job???

The head of a church, especially a State church supported by involuntary contributions. The ....................of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when living and Westminster Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead.

The Devil's dictionary   www.alcyone.com

a member of the most developed and intelligent group of mammals, including humans, monkeys and apes

www.dictionary.cambridge.org

Using video to reinvent the classroom - Salman Khan

In this TED talk, Salman Khan talks about his idea behind the Khan Academy, which has had breathtaking success over the last few years, so much so that some writers have talked about the Khan academy 'spelling the end to traditional universities'.  

August Rambles

Summer in the city can be a sweat.  Literally.  The thermometer keeps going up and your ability to think and to act is steadily diminished.  Thankfully you can drop down to the beach and cool off for a few hours.  
In the evening the heat continues and you wish it wouldn't.  
However, in the third week of August you can take to the streets of Gracia and shake yourself out of your heat induced lethargy.  This is when the Gracia festival starts up, with local streets decorated in wildly imaginative ways, with themed street sculptures and a huge variety of decorations made out of recycled materials.
It's a truly Barcelona festival, and most of the tourists don't get to hear of it because it's a good 30 minutes' walk from the centre of the city.  If you're around in the city in August, it's something that's really worth seeing.

Welcome to ELT Rambles!

Wonderings and Wanderings of a Barcelona based ELT Blogger

Human statue in the Ramblas

You can see some unexpected things when you go rambling.
You might not know where you're going to end up.  
The journey is what it's all about.

This blog is a collection of my wonderings & wanderings in the elt world, and beyond!  Some posts may be only tangentially related to elt, but there will be some tenuous, and of course rambling link.